


Fever and Rime

by White_Rabbits_Clock



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe- Dystopian, Dark John Watson, Dark Sherlock, Institutionalized John, Institutionalized Sherlock, M/M, Mad Sherlock, Mutants
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2017-06-11
Packaged: 2018-05-20 13:31:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 29
Words: 32,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6008101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/White_Rabbits_Clock/pseuds/White_Rabbits_Clock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mycroft is a Freak, or a strain of mutant human able to do extraordinary things. His kind marched with England's Naturals during the War of the Turn and were later hunted down and near-eradicated during the Sack of Power. Nowadays, he keeps his abilities under wraps and works from the shadows with Lestrade's 24th Unit, a crime-solving group of law keepers trying to maintain balance between Freaks and Naturals.<br/>And now he's missing, and the Yard needs someone to take his place and, hopefully, find him. The only one who can rise to the challenge? Sherlock Holmes, registered, certified, incarcerated madman and Freak known as Fever.</p><p>UPDATE 3.28.16: As of today, this an every other work/series of mine is on semi/full hiatus. Updates will be sporadic at best and nonexistent at worse. They are not abandoned. I'm just working on too much stuff right now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Psi

Donovan paced down the hall, the dull thud of her boots preceeding her entrance. Her hair, cropped short, does nothing to hide the strength in her face, nor the dourness of her attitude. Her mouth is pressed into a hard line, slightly upturned nose and full lips just that much more prideful. She seems washed out under the electrical lights inset into the ceiling so as to make them impossible to grip. Or remove. There’s always that.

In front of her walks a textbook guard- big and burly with a Freak’s strength, only 100% Natural. The subvocal hum that constantly plays in the background of every room of this place scatters her concentration, but on mildly. It’s designed to resonate with a Freak’s abilities, and Naturals just don’t have them.

Next to her, an equally imposing Housemaster is flicking through his Window, the tech embedded in his existence letting him check the security cameras ahead of time before they get to where they’re going.

“As much as I trust your judgement, are you sure about this, Agent?”

“Positive.” the man sighs, even as he is keying his PIN into the touch screen to the right of the door they’ve come to. The door and the wall is dead white- a color that’s been known to neutralize the more violent tendencies of some Freaks. At eye level, a sign says “DO NOT ENTER: PSI HALL”.

“Very well. No one is authorized to go in here, except for you. So, just a few rules: stay to the right. All the cells are on the left. There’s a red box outlined in front of each cell. Don’t step into any of them. You’ll need earplugs for the trip both to and from the cell. Don’t take them out until you have to and put them back in as soon as possible. Don’t speak or look at any of the inmates besides the one you’re going to see. Finally, don’t meet his eyes. One of my guards did that. Then he blew his brains out.”

Donovan nodded. This isn’t her first rodeo.

“Good luck. Keep it brief. Spend more than an hour, and the guards won’t let you out, because it’ll be assumed that you’ve fallen prey to someone. Capisce?”

“Yes.”

“Then have at it.” the Housemaster keys the last number and presses enter. The door opens, and Donovan quickly steps through. Five seconds later, the door closes. She slips her earplugs in and enters through a smaller door, which she has been given a keycard for.

Stay to the right. Got it. He told her before hand where her targets at, so she just follows the directions, watches for the red borders, and walks all the way to the end of the hall before taking a right. She never once looks up as she takes another right. Then a third until, by her reckoning, she has made a full circle and, should she blow a hole through the wall directly in front of her, she’d find herself right where she started.

All she can see is opaque glass. She takes out her earplugs and immediately realizes why they told her to keep them in- the subsonic sounds are even worse in here. She swipes a second keycard and enters a second keycode. A countdown appears on the glass.

5...4...3...2...1

“Ah, Agent Donovan. What a pleasure,” a rough, dry voice rumbles at her.

He’s frighteningly thin and tall, the only hair evident enough to be seen from her distance (there is no line for his cell)  is about his jaw and head, both of which are frighteningly long and untamed. The curls appear at least partly tangled, though he seems to have made an effort to at least stay unimprisoned by dreads born of neglect.

“Sherlock Holmes,” Sally says as she remembers what the Housemaster said and drops her gaze.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” She suddenly doesn’t want to tell him, simply because he asked; he always had plans for what he asked.

“I have deal for you,” she says, throat muscling noise past her sudden uncertainty.

“Don’t you always?”


	2. Deal Cutting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock gives Donovan his demands

“One of our partners recently went missing,” Donovan starts. She knows she doesn’t have to spell it out to the detail. There’s only one “partner” that would warrant this little visit. Donovan keeps her eyes firmly fixed on her feet. A little chuckle rolled out from behind the shatter proof glass. 

“So simplistic,” he says. 

“Look up, Donovan. There’s no point in killing you now.” She’s tempted to stay where she’s at, but she doubts she’ll get what she wants like that. With a mental deep breath, she tosses her head back and strides right up to the glass. They’re so close now they could touch. 

“So here’s the deal, Holmes. You solve the bizarre cases, and you get to be free for a time after.”

“Oh?”

“Forty eight hours after each case,” she said. Enough time to sleep, too. She couldn’t promise utter freedom. Not for a madman. Sherlock’s mouth pulls to one side, then the other in an unpeeling smile that erupts into harsh barks of laughter.  Sherlock turns away from the glass, luminescent eyes a little too mad for Sally’s liking as they explore his surroundings for the thousandth time. 

White walls, white ceiling, white pallet for a bed. The darkest thing on him is his wild and untamed hair. She takes in his straight jacket and his white pajama bottoms, his long feet and overgrown toenails sticking out from the bottom along with his ankles because these pants are too short. She takes in the hard floor and hard walls and the sharp ninety degree angles on his pallet and thinks that, should he try to kill himself, he would not be stopped. 

“Here’s my deal, Donovan,” he says with a sharp turn and a baring of teeth in another semblance of a smile.

“I want out. Not half out. Not sort of out. Not out with a stipulation. I want a flat with things in it that I put there. No cameras either. And, since none of this is at all worth the debt you’d be incurring, I also want an assistant. You get all that, and I will solve your interesting cases. I’m not running all over England for the piles of horse shit you get confused by. You can take it or leave it, but you’ll not be doing anything halfway with me. We’re done here,” he turns away from the glass, walks through the middle of the room, abruptly crosses his legs under him, and sinks down so quickly that the heavy masses of hair trailing down his back move briefly as he hits the ground with nary a sound. 

He sits there, ignoring Donovan, back rail straight, head up. Donovan looks again at his room and thinks to herself that maybe trying to half do this thing was a bad idea.

“Good day,” she says, as she inserts her ear plugs, spins on a heal and, keeping to the left, makes her way out of the swirl of madness she’d just walked down. Common sense tells her that letting a madman play house is a bad idea. That the moment they get comfortable with the idea that all he wants is to live in a flat with an assistant and enjoy the distinct lack of a straightjacket, he’ll up and run for it. 

In all honesty, she’d run for it too. She knows what he’s like, knows what he’s done. It’s not the first time she’s worked with him, after all.

 

…

 

_ As always, it was raining; the spitting, thin droplets stinging every bit of exposed skin. The body they’d found appeared to have been hung, going by the bruises at the neck, but he was dangling by an ankle.  _

_ A black cab pulled up, and a young man stepped out, eyes already assessing the officers on duty. He’s talking a mile a minute with Lestrade, who tries to get him to focus on something besides the body for a minute. As they stride through the rain and into the warehouse, the man vaguely hears the officer tell him about someone here, that he needs to be careful now.  _

_ Then, they’re in the damp, cold warehouse and Sherlock is examining the body of a man hanging by one ankle who appears to have been suffocated by the same chain he dangles from now.  _

_ “Sherlock Holmes?” someone interrupts; someone looking for him. Someone who doesn’t know him.  _

_ “This is a suicide. Look,” Sherlock says, pointing up to a dim ledge. “He jumps from there, and he’s stretched out when he does it. So, as he goes, he catches a chain around his neck. But this is an old warehouse, so while it holds briefly- enough to kill him- the rust eventually breaks. The chain isn’t wrapped around him, so he’s in free fall again until he catches this chain-” here, he points at the chain suspended from the roof. It’s been detached on one side, so that it hangs straight down.  _

_ “It twisted, and caught him.” Even though the crime is solved, he seems to still be in the middle of case-adrenaline.  _

_ “So that’s it?” Anderson asked. _

_ “Oh, no, of course not. What are all these chains doing attached to the ceiling? And look,” Sherlock points to another pair of chains that appear to have been the instruments of the same series of events at one point. “It’s happened more than once. Three times,” Sherlock says, pointing to the left. “Four. Five. Six,” he turns back to Lestrade. _

_ “This isn’t just a suicide, it’s a study.” _

_ “Study?” _

_ “Why else would a random selection of people kill themselves in the same warehouse which has chains hanging form the ceiling with no conceivable purpose in the exact same way?” _

_ “So why did we find this one?” _

_ “There’s the question,” Sherlock says, turning away, already distracted again.  _

_ “SHERLOCK HOLMES,” a man says. The detective turns, dark belstaff whirling behind him briefly and dramatically.  _

_ “Oh, you’re having a bad day,” he deduced. “Relative in the hospital, change in management at your job doesn’t agree with you. Speaking of jobs, you have a summons for me, don’t you?” But the man just pulls out what looks like a pen light and presses the button. Odd, subvocal vibrations begin to emanate from it, but Sherlock doesn’t flinch, just holds out his hand. _

_ “Well, as much as I like surprises, stalking me and testing for a Freak response is not the way to go,” he says as the man puts an envelope in his hand.  _

_ “Good day,” Sherlock says as he whirls around go find the ladder they used to climb up so he can examine the chains.  _

 

…

 

They’d heard a lot more about that particular feeler, as they’re called. Special Operative Max Wellis was assigned to Sherlock on account of his “abnormal intellect”, “social deficiencies”, and a “possibility of madness”, all of which was in the first of more than a hundred reports. Though Wellis had supposedly come up with nothing, Sherlock was still arrested during a stay in the hospital for an “advanced evaluation”.

Donovan turned over the keycards, consented to another frisk, and walked through no less than three different detectors before being allowed to leave. In all honesty, as much as she disliked working with him, she opposed his presence on the grounds of ethics; Sherlock was relatively unstable. 

Still, there was no reason to arrest him. Wellis had never seen the more erratic side of him. Through the entire time that he was a leech on all of their lives, there was never one of those bad days where Sherlock should rightfully be high, but has somehow managed to pull through. Never saw him high either, how he seemed able to push through the haze and solve and deduce regardless of the dosage. Wellis never saw a night when the genius seemed alarmingly suicidal. 

He’d never had anything substantial. Donovan doubts that Sherlock’s arrest is truly because of his “Freak” label. Afterall, the only things odd about him are all found in other, Natural people. 

Donovan pulls out her phone as she gets into her car and peels through the parking lot and out of the gate. 

“DI Lestrade.”

“He agreed,” she says immediately. 

“Good. Thanks, Donovan,” he says like he knows how much this might cost her. Donovan hangs up. She doesn’t want to think about it.


	3. A Bit Mad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock does some grooming with a bit of help.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finished a minute ago. Let me know what you think!

The flat is what he asked for; the furniture’s hodgepodge, a skull from a long time ago is sitting on the mantle. Nothing’s in pristine order, which is exactly how he likes it. He walks through the flat and finds that the printer has been left with quite a bit of paper. 

Good. Ooh. It’s color, too. 

Sherlock turns back to his companion. 

“What do you think?” the man just nods. But Sherlock can tell that he’s secretly pleased. In a few strides, Sherlock is directly in front of the bearded, baggy-eyed, hooded-browed man in front of him. 

“Tell me, how do you feel about cutting hair?”

“That depends on why?”

“Well, I like people automatically choosing to stay away,” Sherlock murmurs as he steps just that much closer. They’re just a few inches apart, now. “Thankfully, my hair does that. The beard however,” he runs his hands over the thick thatch that’s far too long, “is too much. I was wondering if you’d cut it, John.”

The voice does not escape John, and after a few moments staring, that mouth quirks up. 

“No problem.” It’s the first hint of mystery Sherlock seen in a long time.  John waits for him to turn and make his way into the bathroom before following. When Sherlock is stationed on a chair he’d already hauled from the kitchen, John flips through the bathroom supplies. He sets a straight edge razor on the edge of the sink. 

“This fine?”

“Of course.” John continues to look for things. Sherlock watches him.

“You know the interesting thing about straight edge razors?” John turns back around.

“The only time in history a man willingly lets someone else bring a knife to his throat and isn’t in for a bloody death is when that man is under one,” he says, watching John. It’s a dare, of course. Will John kill him? Will he choose to get out of this by being the man that killed Fever? Or will he run that knife along his throat and cut away his beard to leave him with a clean shaven madman?

It’s a question Sherlock is not afraid to engage in finding the answer to.

“Not the only time.” John says as he sets shaving cream on the sink’s edge and drapes a towel across his chest.

“That so?”

“Yes. It’s called surgery.” Sherlock was wondering if he’d catch the mistake; if he’d make Sherlock’s error known or if he’d let it go again. 

A person has under seven seconds to make a good first impression. 

Seven seconds is long enough to initiate sex or cause a fight. It’s long enough to kill someone. It’s long enough to fire a gun or make a decision to run into danger (or away from it). In Sherlock’s opinion, it only takes as long as the first action to make an impression.

The first time Sherlock saw John was before they’d moved him to solitary. In the wide room where he was required to take meals (actual food, back then) John had entered and looked around. He’d hugged one side of the wide door, despite it being empty. He was new, and Sherlock was interested.

Quickly, dark blue eyes had surveyed the room, looking for threats, entrances, exits, collecting impressions. When they hit Sherlock, the genius- that’s what they mostly referred to, back when he wasn’t in solitary, had leaned forwards on his elbows and raised his head, daring him to walk over.

John had held his stare for a few moments before quirking an eyebrow and moving on. The message is clear: you come to me. Sherlock had loved it. He made sure he was there every time the doctor- that’s what he was, after all- came for his food. 

Every day, Sherlock took the same posture. Every day, he got the eyebrow. It was a battle of resilience, if nothing else. They’d never gotten to finish it, really, because Sherlock tended to fuck up when he had things going for him. Still, it was fun while it lasted.

 

…

 

Doctor’s careful hands took his beard and tangled in it. He tugs a bit more than he has to as he examines the knots under the guise of figuring out where he wants to cut. With a pair of good scissors, he just barely cuts through the first centimeter before readjusting the scissors. He’s too close to Sherlock’s jaw, and is pretending to be reckless with the cutting, but Sherlock knows he won’t be hurt; it’s too early in the game. When he gets through the last bit of beard, he takes the long and tangled mass and lays it across the toilette seat. 

Then, he takes his time in spreading the shaving cream across his face. It wasn’t entirely clinical, judging by the pressure he felt against both pulse points. With enough force, you could knock a man unconscious by holding them simultaneously for seven seconds. With enough force, you could break a man’s neck. With enough force, you could crush that windpipe John now holds in his hands. A few more moments, then he’s withdrawing.

The razor, winking in the bathroom light, adrenalizes him. This is it. This is when John really makes his impression.  

The smooth slide of the knife in a steady hand didn’t used to be exhilarating. 

It used to be nothing; whoever had that knife was either someone paid or Sherlock himself. There was never a challenge hidden in the motion. There was no threat in the steel. There was nothing to engage him. Now there is.

John draws it out as long as possible, but eventually, a strong jaw and pale neck is completely visible and bereft of hair. Wipes the razor one last time and whisks the towel off of Sherlock’s chest. With a nod, he moves to pass Sherlock and leave him to his devices but the Freak lifts a leg and plants a foot on the sink cabinet. 

John looks back at him.

“Aren’t you going to stay?” it’s not really a question. It’s meant to aggravate. John abruptly twists so that he’s directly in Sherlock’s face. They could kiss right now, there’s so close.

“Not a chance,” he breathes. Then, he’s gone, round the back of the chair, despite the lack of space. Sherlock huffs a quiet laugh to himself. This right here will be the real entertainment. 

An hour later, John is preparing to take a shower of his own as Sherlock adjusts his clothing in the mirror. He casts a critical glance at his appearance. As always, dark circles and skin of an unhealthy pallor stretching over sharp cheekbones give him away as unhealthy. By Sherlock’s count, he’ll look better within the week. As for the rest of him, well.

He’s tall; and pale, and his hair is a wild mess of curls that stretch halfway down his back. He hasn’t seen a single date in years, but, with his hair unknotted, he’ll guess he’s been in an asylum for at least four years. After all, hair grows at half an inch per month, which is six inches per year, and his hair is curly, but still reaches past his shoulder blades, so he estimates his hair (straightened) to have grown about two feet, not including what was already there by the time of his arrest. 

He’s combed it out and washed and conditioned and applied a very light oil to it and, on top of that, brushed it out slowly to bring out the long, wild spirals that people love to stare at so much. He’s paired it with a purple button down and slim trousers and black cap toes. All in all, he’d say he looks a bit mad, which is his intention. 

Wouldn’t want them forgetting, after all.


	4. Testing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock tests John.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, if you're still with me, thank you so much! let me know what you think!

John is… he’s not resisting, per say, but Sherlock gets the feeling that he’s being strung along a bit. Not a whole lot, mind you, but enough that he’s getting impatient; biting at a bit he can’t break. 

On Tuesday, July 23rd, 2083, Sherlock tried to corner him in the kitchen. They’d been this close, and then John had somehow managed to slip away. It was fun. The following Thursday, after an eighteen hour case, they were next to each other on the landing, giggling about a news anchor who’d pretended to have the ability to poison people at will, and instead been killed by someone who actually COULD poison people at will. 

That had been fun, and it got better, because Sherlock tried to needle him by brushing their hips together on the way through the door, which was also a follow up from their “romantic” dinner and tearful reunion (Angelo, not Sherlock), in which Sherlock had convinced the owner without ever saying a word that John is his.

That had all but succeeded too, since, since John had brushed back. But then he sped up, and the moment was lost. How odd it is, to be living with a mystery who seems unable to decide whether he wants you or not. 

Because that is most certainly what’s on John’s mind. Sherlock knows he’s attractive, and if he had to guess, he would say he’s John’s type. The problem, of course, is that John believes Sherlock to be truly mad, while the doctor himself is at least a bit sane. Still, Sherlock thinks it makes him harder to resist, in which case, he’d guess that John won’t decide out of pure stubbornness. 

Still, he has an infinite amount of time to cook up schemes. He’s him, after all. For instance, he’s playing violin very, very early in the morning, and he knows John’s hearing it, too, because he’s shifting around in his attic bedroom. 

Sherlock begins to play dozen feverish bars at a fast pace.

“Holmes!” John yelled down the stairs. He stops abruptly.

“Yes?”

“Stop that.” Sherlock played a screeching variation of “no” in response. Soon enough, the creaking of John’s bed, the opening and closing of a door- even when no one could possibly go in, he still closes it- and the sound of bare feet on stairs proceeds his entrance. He stalks directly up to Sherlock, who has switched back to his previous, heady tune.

Unfortunately for John, Sherlock is actually sitting in his chair. He’ll have to get a bit messy if he wants the bow, which is what Sherlock guesses he’s about to go for. Sherlock smiles sweetly, waiting for him to move. In the back of his mind, he can’t decide whether he wants John to retreat and leave Sherlock to test his limits, or charge and let Sherlock test what it looks like when he snaps (mildly, at least).

There’s a gleam in his eyes- an interested gleam- and suddenly, he begins to circle the chair, rough hand skimming along the corner closest to Sherlock’s head. The fingertips drag along the well worn fabric, and Sherlock just barely avoids him snatching the bow. When he comes round the front of it, their eyes meet across the space between them, and if feels at once too much and not enough.

At this point, Sherlock knows, John will either proceed or back off; he cannot maintain equilibrium. He chooses to press forwards, tackling Sherlock from the left, over the arm of the chair. He manages to dive for the bow… and comes up with the violin. Oh. It takes a lot of training for that kind of precision, which is what Sherlock was checking for. 

Sherlock doesn’t give chase; the years have turned him into an excellent thief, and he can get it back when he wants it. As it is, he has something interesting to think about. 

Here’s the situation: a man with high levels of training is incarcerated and classified as a madman despite being relatively sane. Sherlock’s going to bet his ass that Watson must have served in the War of the Turn. As a doctor. As a non-Freak doctor. How interesting. 

Unless, of course, Watson is not Natural. But then that would ask the questions what is it that Watson can do and what did he do to get himself incarcerated. Sherlock smiles. He had guessed as much. Before they put him in long-term solitary, he’d gathered as much data about Watson as possible. Right now, he’s just confirming. 

Speaking of confirming, where would Watson put his violin? He doubts he’d hurt it; he’s not wasteful enough to break a very expensive instrument. He could put it in the armoire (he’s choosing to ignore the possibility of Watson putting his violin under the bed. That’s a child’s place. He’ll have to investigate further.

…

Mycroft’s cold. Dreadfully so, too. Of course, that’s what you get for just randomly disappearing off the planet. He’s buried up to his ears in a good coat, a thick scarf, and heavy clothing, his hands are leather covered with one jammed into his pockets, and his head is down as he walks through the ridiculously stinging rain, the other hand out to hold his hat in place. But he’s still freezing.

He hazards a glance up. 8371… 8373… 8375! Triumphant, he unlocks the door and steps inside, right into the scope of someone’s gun. 

“Stand down, it’s just me,” Mycroft says, locking the door back behind him. The house is cavernous and dark; sinister without the light that usually graces its foyer. 

“You’re running a fever,” a woman says as she descends the stairs. Even in the dead quiet, Mycroft cannot hear her feet. 

“I know,” the older says. That’s why he’s so cold.

“Maybe you should rest.”

“I’ll rest when I’m dead, my dear,” he counters as he takes her hand and kisses it carefully. 

“Of course. Did you get what you were after?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re brother?”

“Yes.”

“So what’s the next phase?” Mycroft smiles. He always loves when the plot begins to thicken; that wavering uncertainty of whether the cake of the situation will rise or flop is a sensation to be enjoyed, as there’s no telling which way it will go.

“Now we wait; let everyone get used to the change in events.”

“And maybe take a nap.”

“Yes. That, too.” he steps around her and finds his way, by memory, to a private bedroom. As he strips his overcoat, scarf, hat, and such, the room begins to get colder, frost climbing up the walls and forming interesting patterns against the columns of the four poster bed and across its curtains. He slides inside of it, once he’s removed as much of his clothing as he dares to, as the temperature drops into the negatives. He’s asleep before his body has fully relaxed.


	5. Red Hair

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock and John, casing together.

On Wednesday, three days after A Study In Pink, Sherlock lights a jumper on fire and watches it burn while he sits in front of the fireplace. The oatmeal colored monstrosity has decided to resist. He gets his hair oil and throws it in there. The nutty smell of jojoba oil begins to permeate the air.

He takes a sip of tea and glances at his violin, restored to its stand 57 hours ago. (He found it sitting on the bed, so John had apparently not meant to hide it from him; merely shut him the fuck up for a while). He hears the door close. Ah, John’s back. This ought to be interesting.

The click-click of the handle twisting proceeds the door opening and closing quietly.

“You know, you can burn them all you want, but it’s not going to stop me from wearing them.”

“Bet.” Sherlock says, still staring into the flames. He wonders if he can do an experiment involving burning body parts. He’d have to find something to contain the odor, though. Jojoba oil is very faint in scent, but he can still smell it just fine, so he’d need to have someway to contain the odor that would come from burning a body (or part of one. Or more than one. Which ever’s funner.). 

He picks up tea again and watches as the fire finishes eating through the wool. There's more to burn, but it’s unrecognizable. A pack of biscuits appears by his thigh while Sherlock stares at the leaping flames. He wants to burn something else, now.

“On a scale of one to twenty, how are you doing?”

“I’m at three right now.” Sherlock knows John’s going to catalogue that. On the boredom scale, burning starts at three. John seems to have remembered that it’s his jumper that’s burning.

“Don’t burn my jumpers.”

“They’re hideous.”

“If you can store heads in the fridge, I can wear ugly jumpers.”

“That’s not fair,” Sherlock said, half whining as he turned to face him in his blue dressing gown. 

“I can just start throwing your shit out. It’d be healthier.” John said as he faced the fridge, still perplexed as to where exactly Sherlock got a head from.

“Define healthy.”

“Not likely to kill or cause illness.”

“Well, a bored me is likely to kill or cause illness.” John rolls his eyes. There’s no point in continuing on.

“Did Lestrade not drop off a cold case earlier?”

“He did. It’s boring.”

“Tell me about it.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It’ll slow the boredom.” Sherlock turns back to the fire. He can’t pick out the pieces of jumper anymore.

“Fine.”

 

…

 

Two days later, and they have something interesting to do. Sherlock straightens up, long, grasshopper like legs unfolding gracefully.

“Well?” Donovan says, standing to the right and a few feet behind Sherlock.

“Where’s the assistant?”

“Found a job a week ago.”

“Yes, he did,” Sherlock says, turning and striding out the vault by way of the hole in the wall, dug from the pawn shop next door. In short order, he’s next to the two feelers standing on either side of a redheaded man, sitting miserable and afraid between them, handcuffs on his wrists.

“Mr. Wilson.”

“Yes?”

“When did you meet Spaulding?”

“Ah… I’m… going to say January, of this year.” Sherlock nods.

“The robber, then, is not Wilson. It’s Spaulding.”

“Prove it,” one of the feelers spits. Sherlock gives him a once over, disgust just barely twisting his features in a look so practiced that it’s barely an act.

“It’s the hair.”

“Hair?”

“Yes. It looks like fire, which, as I mentioned earlier, has had overzealous finger pointers like you up his ass more than once, on grounds of the Freak act, drafted in 2070, passed in the December of that year, which, when simplified,” this, with even more disgust, “authorized an investigation of you on grounds of possible misuse of Freak abilities. This, of course, made Wilson vulnerable in a very dangerous way. His circumstances were right, which is why Spaulding sought out Wilson in the first place, so that he could dig into the bank. The extra work? To make sure Wilson was out of the shop- which, mind you, doubles as his place of residence- for at least a few hours every day. After that, all Spaulding had to do was make a copy of the key and find work elsewhere, which cements his alibi, and making Wilson the only plausible lead to the bank robbery. Find Spaulding, and you’re closer to your money.”

“You’ll find Spaulding?” A feeler asks as Sherlock unlocks Wilson’s handcuffs.

“Of course. John!” He says, dropping the key into Wilson’s hands and striding out the door. The real fun, the kind that lets him sleep when he gets home, begins now. They stride out into the street and catch a cab before anyone realizes that the hunt starts now, not later.

“So where is Spaulding?”

“Somewhere he sees as safe.”

The cab drops them off at a cemetery, and John follows quietly, gun out (Sherlock’s not the only one with sticky fingers) and attention focused. In short order, they find themselves at a grave- the only grave in the whole cemetery with dates more recent than ten years. Sherlock kicks at the freshly turned earth.

“Someone’s been here recently. Dug up and then replaced the dirt. Come on.” They hide behind a great birch tree until well after nightfall when plodding steps wanders along the row of neat graves.

“Found it,” a man says.

“How could you have found it if you’ve seen it before and it’s always here?”

“I forgot.” 

“Vincent Spaulding,” Sherlock calls out as he steps from behind the tree, “I presume.”

“Who are you?!” Vincent says switchblade already in hand as he stares.

“You’re under arrest for stealing crap.” Sherlock says, deliberately sounding a bit unprofessional. 

After that, the evening flies. Vincent charges Sherlock, who clocks him in the side with an elbow as he tries to avoid the same. John tackles the brute, sneaking up behind him and clobbering him before popping in the back of the head with the but of his gun. They are both down and the police lights are shining as two lower officers dig through to the coffin and unearth all the cash inside.

John does not quite come back to himself in all the time it takes to do these things. It is only in the cab that he realizes.

“So…”

“That was fun, no?”

“Yeah.”

“You wouldn’t be averse to continuing this with me?”

“No. No I wouldn’t.”

For whatever stupid, silly reason, something knotty unfolds inside Sherlock’s chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I adapted this case from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red-Headed_League


	6. Shiver

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock remembers (and messes with John. There's always that)

MYCROFT

He hadn’t meant to sleep this long, but sleep he certainly did. He sits up amid a veritable winter inside the bedroom, tiny clouds snowing tiny flakes, none of which are larger than what comfortably fits on the edge of his nail. Baby flurries pile the snow in some places and weather it away in others. The walls, bed, and curtain (he’d had to defrost that one) are utterly overrun with icy, wintry art. He always does this when he’s healing. The more that’s there when he awake, the longer he’s been at it and the healthier he is.

He swings his legs down and notices that the alarm clock has been removed. Damn that woman. Nevermind that. His mouth tastes like death. A new suit sits inside the closet door (which was closed). He collects it, along with an undershirt, a pair of socks, a pair of shoes, and a mini, never before used manicure kit and heads to the shower. There’s a comb, toothbrush, travel bottles of shampoo and conditioner, floss, mouthwash, deodorant, soap, loofah, and lotion, all of which are still sealed or packaged.

He contents himself in recapturing his appearance, first working through the familiar routine of brushing and flossing before taking to the shower and scrubbing the fever (and the tension) away from every bit of himself before moving on to his hair (it’s nice to be rid of scalp buildup).

By the time he steps out of the shower and into the soft towel, he’s feeling more like himself. It only takes him fifteen minutes to finish his morning groomings after that. By the time his stomach refuses to be ignored, he’s very much ready for breakfast in a pale green suit and purple-red tie.

“And here I thought you’d never wake up,” A voice calls to him as he steps into the small breakfast nook he knew would be occupied. There is a tea pot, cups, sugar, and milk waiting. He takes a seat and sets about pouring as yet another storm rages outside.

“I would have, if you’d left the damn clock alone,”

“Ah, but then you’d have been still sick, and you know how sick people put a damper on… well, everything. And if I had slept past any decent time, what would have you done then?”

“Replugged in the alarm, vacated the room, and stayed well clear of the door,” Mycroft dignifies that with an eyeroll.

“Are you ready?” He asks after a few minutes silence, in which he has had his first sip of good english tea in quite a while. 

“Hmm. All but. The lovely darling wishes for another session.” Mycroft turns his eyes away to the window, thoughts somewhere else.

“At your discretion, then,” he says after a moment. “Do recall the sneakiness of those who have everyone’s eyes on them, though.” His partner nods.

“Of course.”

SHERLOCK

Sometimes, when his mind’s too fast and his life’s too slow, he takes to the streets. He does returns from a walk now, shivering in his clothes. He’d left the coat and been caught in the rain (stupid, it’s August.). It’s made him forget the uneventfulness of the week as he walks into his flat and up the stairs (thankfully, Miss Hudson’s not home; visiting Miss Turner, most likely. Right next door, after all), already half frozen. 

John glances up as he enters, and Sherlock can see him deliberating. Help him, and let it be known he cares, giving Sherlock a leg up in their little game. Don’t help, and guarantee a sick Sherlock, leaving him resisting the help-him-for-god’s-sake-you’re-a-doctor instinct for a great deal longer. With a sigh, the doctor folds his newspaper, rises, and puts the kettle on. Sherlock stops and watches. 

As John’s back turns, the detective strides quickly up behind him. He’s not as quiet when his clothes are wet, and the doctor wheels around just in time to catch a frontal assault of detective. Sherlock’s less than an inch away. John does the only thing he can- fake it.

“Problem?”

“You want things you won’t give yourself. Why?”

“None of your damn business,” John says as he tries to edge around Sherlock. The detective doesn’t let it happen, pressing forwards so fast that he catches the left side of John’s hip.

“You want me,” he turns his head until his breath is ghosting across John’s face. “But you won’t give yourself permission to come and get me. Why?”

“None-” Here, John pushes up against him, and pokes him in the stomach, causing an instant flopping-fish reaction, “of your business.” It seems Sherlock’s ruined the “help him now save trouble later” attitude, because John retreats to his room, leaving Sherlock with a kettle full of lukewarm water. 

He’s so frustrating.

Ah, well, nothing left but to be obvious. He walks stiffly down the hall to his room and, with shaking fingertips, shimmies out of his wet clothing and immediately wishes he hadn’t done that, because it’s fucking cold. 

He pushes past the initial reaction and finds a towel to scrub down with before pulling on his pajamas and silk robe and (for the first time in a long time) a pair of socks. He flips his head upside down and wraps a second towel around his head before making his way to the kitchen again. 

Oh. 

The tea has already been taken care of (thank god). In the time it took him to dry off, John must have come down and finished the job. He glances towards the living room and finds a thick white comforter (the spare to his bedding) sitting in his well used and undeniably comfortable chair.

He smiles. So maybe he got to the good doctor after all.

He takes his tea to the living room and sets about wrapping the blanket around himself. His hands are still shaking. How peculiar. They haven’t done that in a long time. Not… not since a very disastrous day.

…

_ The country apparently didn’t want to be seen as brutal or considered barbaric on account of how they treat their incarcerated. That was the only reason Sherlock could see for having “exercise time”. Nevertheless, the detective took what he could get and walked out onto the grounds in the warm sunlight. It had been awhile since he saw it.  _

_ He found a nice spot on the concrete where the sun had warmed the metal behind him and the artificial stone beneath him and tried to soak up what comfort is to be had in this small mercy. He took the time where the distractions were at a minimum to step inside his mind palace.  _

_ The place was a mess. Books of information have been knocked off the high, imposing shelves in the foyer. Snippets of memories had broken free of their embodiments as they fell of shelves behind doors. Locks had been broken, windows thrown open, floors, doors, and ceilings cracked, wood rotted, messes made and not picked up. This was not the way a mind palace is supposed to look.  _

_ So Sherlock did what he can do- pick up a book. He looked at the title: A Study In Mannerisms: Part I: Londoners Under Minimal to Medium Pressure. The Mannerisms Series was classified as a “Human” related book, in the “M”s, under the “Studies” section, which took up the entire right wall and half of the left. He floated up to where the rest of the Mannerisms books were kept and replaces it, carefully making sure its spine is exactly parallel. Huh. He was missing IV, too.  _

_ He floated down and picked up the next book, simply titled Victor Trevor. The Human part of the Studies section was divided into two parts: Clinical Trials and Case Studies. Victor Trevor would go in the Case Study. He took it there quickly and returned. _

_ A Study in Tobacco Ash: Part II is the next book. It goes in the next room, under Nonhuman Studies, in Clinical Trials. He did this until all fifty nine books and four snippets of memories had been taken care of. The he moves on to the books in the next room, which encompass all of his nonhuman information, and picked up the forty eight displaced volumes and picked out the five memories from the floor and pages. _

_ With all the books put away and the memories safely contained in little drawstring pouches, he moves to the second floor, which contained the raw footage for all his studies. There are three memories that he returned to the great glass jars that held them. One of the jars were broken, the other two needed lid replacements, which he took his time in doing. He double checked the neat white labels with black print before returning those three snippets.  _

_ Then, with the first and second floors cleaned up (even the cracks and blemishes of old age had faded from the exterior with Sherlock’s renewed presence), he goes to the third floor, which contains rooms for ever book currently being written. _

_ One of the snippets goes to a small key which was bent in half. He straightened the key, and the drawstring pouch was suddenly empty. A second one was returned when he sharpened a broken pencil. A third was settled with the correction of a broken stitch in a straight jacket, the fourth in the fixed glass of a snowglobe, and the fifth in the restored wood of an umbrella handle.  _

_ He sighed as he stood at the stairs, gazing up into the dark. But he didn’t go up another floor; it was closed off. Determined to enjoy what time he had, he turned back to the now bright, refurbished hallway and it’s neat rows of french and entrance doors, depending on the activity of the rooms within.  _

_ He frowned. It was time to return. _

_ The first thing he noticed was the wet, how it struck him in the face and soaked his clothes and made him feel like he was downing. He bolts to his feet. Oh, how long was he inside? What time was it? He runs around to the entrance he’d first been let out of, only to find the doors locked. He was stuck outside till the storm’s over. He went back to his place, aware that there was some shelter to be had if he could simply find it.  _

_ He looked around and saw that the rain was held back a little ways away by an overhang. He bolted for it, and continued to shiver. He crouched down, pulled his knees in, locked his arms and bowed his head. That done, he deliberately drifted back off into his mind palace. Whatever happens outside, it beat nothing inside. _

_ He came back himself struggling, kicking, and screaming. There were hands everywhere. Hands and, Sherlock quickly discovered, straps.  _

_ “Stupid bastard!” Someone cursed as Sherlock kicked something solid.  _

_ “Leave him.” Another voice said, and Sherlock could taste the authority coming from it. _

_ “But he’ll catch hypothermia like that.” _

_ “I said leave him. Let him wait it out for an hour or three. Then he’ll let you do your work.” Quite suddenly, all pressure was gone, and Sherlock pushed himself up off the bed and retreated to a corner while institution personnel escorted themselves out. He catches the murderous yet sympathetic gaze of a doctor before the door closed and the heavy smack of a deadbolt echoed in the metal room. _

_ For the first ten seconds, Sherlock was find with his situation. He was still wet, yes, but blessedly alone. Then the shivering started. _


	7. It's Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John and Sherlock totally just happened. Sally gets a little worried. Mycroft starts to think.

Nothing good or bad ever really lasts. Yes, things get worse, and bad luck comes in strings and storms and seems (and sometimes is) ubiquitous, but the situation does change, just not for the better. 

This is what Sally keeps in mind as she looks on from her desk at Lestrade’s office. The DI is tense and subtly angry, which anyone who knows him would know. To this stranger, though, he’s just polite- a little distant, yes, but still polite. 

Sally didn’t catch what his name badge (not tag. Badge with a capital B.) says when he walked by, but she doesn’t need it to know that this man is bad news. He is a feeler, and there’s only one person he’d be here to feel. The man rises, inclines his head, and exits the office. Before he turns, Sally’s eyes are back on her computer, fingers flying over the keyboard.

In a few more minutes, she ignores the world around her before she finishes. Then, she rises, grabs her coat and walks out the door. 

“Anderson,” she calls as she steps past the break room. Half an hour ago, he was talking to a witness. 

“How’d it go?” Matching black boots thud together as they head out to Sally’s car. 

“Fine. She’s too shifty. Probably won’t stand up in court.” He says under his breath. Sally’s the only one that can hear it. 

“That sucks.” She murmurs back as they get in and gun the engine. 

“Where are we headed?”

“We have an assignment in Marylebone.” The answer, of course, is code for “we’re going to see Sherlock”.

The rest of the ride, Anderson stares off into space and Sally concentrates intently on the road ahead and around her. They’re at odds, here, because Anderson does not think being any closer to Sherlock than they have to be will end well for either of them; he has a history of manipulation and exploitation, after all. Still, Anderson will follow, because he believes in Donovan’s sense of right an wrong, paltry as it is in front of Sherlock’s intellect.

They pull up in front of 221B and Donovan parks and exits the car. Followed closely by Anderson, she walks in and up to the flat. At first glance, the messy flat seems to be normal, with a half-empty teacup Sherlock must have abandoned and a fresh steaming one. Donovan walks over to the former and sticks her finger in it. Room temperature. She pulls her finger out and looks at the new cup next to John’s chair. It’s still steaming. She sets her fingers against the outside and pulls away quickly. It’s scalding and the tea is still distilling, so the flat’s less notorious occupant must be returning soon, if at all. 

“Morning.” John says as he appears from the bathroom. He eyes Anderson before checking his drink, which Sally had stepped away from before he came back from the restroom. 

“Morning. Where’s Sherlock?”

“Sleeping.” She eyes John. His hair is wet and slicked back, he’s wearing a robe, and he looks freshly washed. As she watches, the doctor picks up Sherlock’s abandoned teacup and takes it to the kitchen. 

John is oddly systematic about removing dishes and cups, so the tea wouldn’t have been there long after Sherlock abandoned it. It’s already lukewarm, yes, but it doesn’t mean much, since the detective’s been known to ignore the opportunity for food and drink.

If Sherlock’s asleep, he hasn’t been down for long. Sally notices that there is… oh. There’s a dark mark on John’s neck, partially hidden by the collar of his robe. She pretends not to notice it, but now she knows why Sherlock’s sleeping. 

She hands John the cold case.

“We need this looked over. I realize it’s a bit below Sherlock’s interest level, but we don’t have the men or the resources to carry on right now.” John shrugs.

“The deal was he solves the interesting cases. He probably won’t take this.” John said as he takes a drink of his tea. 

“I know. Just ask him?” 

“I’m not your go-between.”

“Yes, but I bet he’ll be asleep for who knows how long, so I’d rather not stick around.” After a moment, John nods. Sally drops the file on the table, tugs her short jacket, and marches out of the door, proud as ever.

For a few moments, there is utter silence in the flat as John listens for the tell-tale sound of the door closing. 

“They’re gone, now.” Sherlock steps out of the bathroom John had ventured from fifteen minutes ago. 

“They’re so tiresome.”

“I think she had something important to tell you.” John muses as he flips off the cover of the case.

“Oh, I know. Hacked the Yard’s cameras this morning. There’s a new feeler. Got Lestrade all twisted, too,” He says with a hint of contempt.

“Didn’t Lestrade care for you before…?”

“He did, it’s just there’s really no need to get all worried that there’s a new man up my ass.”

“Right. Because the first time just ended so well.” Sherlock tosses a black towel onto the couch and lays down with his hair resting against it. John smiles a bit, because apparently those curls are enhanced by flipping one’s upper body upside down and shaking like a wet dog. The funniest part was his loss of balance half way through.

“Oh, come off it, mister “‘Having My Head Scratched Turns Me Into A Lump!’”

“You hit your side on the sink!”

“And you got so distracted that you’re not even wearing pants right now!” At this last statement, there’s a beat of silence, and then the both of them are laughing so hard that John has to put down his tea before he spills it all over his nice, clean, (ahem)  _ marked _ skin. When the laughter subsides, Sherlock has curled onto his side. His eyes droop and his breathing slows. 

“John,” he says sleepily as he pulls his feet even closer. They’re too cold, now.

“What?”

“The murders mean nothing.” Then he’s out cold, leaving his companion, partner in arms, and recently, boyfriend to stare at him. After a few moments, John takes an uneasy glance at the case file.

That can’t be good.

 

…

 

Mycroft stands on the balcony, front just inches away from the stone railing, and stairs out over the garden at the back of the house. It’s rather lovely. He contemplates freezing every single plant and stone he can see. 

He flips a coin through his fingers, the over-under movement soothing enough to allow his thoughts to flow more freely through his mind. Behind him, on the little glass-and-metal side table next to the chair just inside the doorway, the newspaper headline speaks of the solved triple murder of three sisters, believed to be Freaks, but proven innocent by the Scotland Yard. It also, in a smaller, much less noticed article says that government official Mr. Briant A. Goodham ingested a cocktail of bleach and ammonia and died after vomiting half of it up in his bathroom. 

It does and does not surprise Mycroft. Goodham was an extortionist and very good at getting government money, but he’s pretty third tier. As far as Mycroft’s been able to figure out, the conditions needed for suicide aren’t really there. It looks it, yes, but it’s a facade. Which means he was probably murdered. 

There’s only one person who could get away with that kind of murder.

Mycroft strides back inside and swings the french door closed. After flicking the latch and lock, he closes the door and sits back a bit in his chair, sets elbows to arm rests and the tips of his fingers together, six inches above his lap. He leans his head back and stares off into space while his tea grows cold and the sun sets through the white, gauzy curtains. 

From the looks of things, it’s time to make his move.

 


	8. A Deal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock gets himself into some trouble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back! Not for real, unfortunately, but I couldn't focus till I wrote this out, so here. Let me know what you think.

Sherlock sits, reclined, in the deep, comfortable chair. He hasn’t been here long, but from the way he’s sitting, you’d think he’d come hours ago. His fingers tap a silent beat on the real leather of the armrest; the melody to the harmony his foot jiggles out from where it’s resting a foot of the floor.

He’s restless, anxious, nervous, even. He wants to leave, to go back to John, but knows he can’t. Not yet. Not till he’s done what he came to do. He recalls, as he’s sitting in this fake leather chair, that this wouldn’t be the first time he’s been in this position.

 

…

 

They didn’t take him to jail. The police car that picked him up took him to a nondescript office building, where he’d been shoved into an elevator (paranoia is what they were feeling, and paranoia breeds fear, and fear breeds violence, even against a kid as scrawny as Sherlock).

The box they were in was covered in mirrors, and he stared intensely at his gag. It was there because he’d lost control again. Sometimes the teasing lead to that, to his dropping with knees against cold linoleum, hands over ears, head bowed, yelling at the world to be quiet. This time it actually happened, so he’d run as fast as he could away from the school and been promptly picked up, gagged, cuffed, and brought to this stupid shiny elevator box. 

The doors, with a soft ding, opened. The policemen quickly shoved him into the room. So quickly, in fact, that they hit his shoulder on edge of the elevator as it was opening. Then, the heavy, bruising metal was closing again, and Sherlock was left alone in the dim interior.

Truth be told, he actually found it nice. It was quiet, with no ostentatious coloring to the cushy armchairs, the carpet, the low table, or anything else. Sherlock noticed that, at one end of the room, an island had been set up with great canisters of hot water and coffee, with teacups and mugs, sugar, liquid creamer, etc there as well. He didn’t know if he was more unnerved by the change in apparent treatment or the comforted by it.

He went over to the table and, for the first time, noticed a dark card the same color as the wood. He picked it up and arched an eyebrow.

 

It may be a bit, so go ahead and relax.

 

He stayed standing until a door between him and the island opened, and a rather tall gentleman stepped through. He looked nice, if as undistinguished as the building’s facade. Sherlock liked his blonde hair and the careful goatee. 

“Mr. Sherlock Holmes?” The boy cocked his head. At fifteen, he was more of a cynic than Mycroft, and strangers knowing your name set off every alarm bell he had.

“Maybe.” Goatee chuckled.

“Alright, Sherlock, we know about the panic attack you had. We know about how everyone did exactly what you said. Do you know what that means?” The man, as he had talked, had fixed himself a coffee and taken one of the armchairs. 

“Yes.” These last few years, he’d understood without ever needing to ask that there was an unspoken illness he did not want to have. This thing that plagued some of the population made them monsters, outcasts, unwanteds, demons…

“What are you, Sherlock?”

“A Freak.”

“Yes, that’s right. But, you don’t have to be like the others, you know.” This peaked Sherlock’s interest. He would hate the prison cells, the asylums, the meds that other Freaks got. He should like to avoid that, he thought.

“You see, son-”

“I’m not your son.”

“Sorry. You see, Sherlock, we’ve a bit of a problem, me and my friends do, that is, and we know that the fastest, best way to solve that problem would be if Freaks like you helped out. The problem with that, unfortunately, is that not all Freaks are stable enough to use, and the ones that do all have control problems. 

“You, though- now you’re special. That last time was the first time your abilities showed, yes?”

“Yes.”

“So we can train you from day one, and you can be stable, and have your abilities and avoid the asylums, in exchange for your help. You would, of course, still be able to pursue your own interests.”

Sherlock was quiet for several seconds. No more looks. No more gossiping. No more ostracizing. Just experiments and training and more experiments. All he has to do is lend his help but…

“What kind of help?” he said as he took a seat in the chair across, trying to give the man the impression that he’s weakening.

 

…

 

“Holy Shit!” the man swore as the door open and the lights revealed the visitor in the chair. 

“Shut the door,” Sherlock said as he lit a cigarette. The man did.

“Who are you?” Sherlock plunged the smoking, chemical thing into the depths of his hood.

“Doesn’t matter. What matters is that your very sad. So sad, in fact, that you feel like going to sleep and never waking up.” Sherlock walked over to the balcony, hopped onto the railing, and was gone from sight directly after.

 

…

 

John frowned as he looked at the newspaper. A lot of government officials are biting the dust lately.

Sherlock, across from him, watches quietly.

“You know what’s interesting about you?”

“What?”

“That you were imprisoned at all.  In fact, it’s so unlikely that not only am I but I am absolutely flabbergasted at the fact that you and I wound up in the same institution together,” he drawls in a flat, sarcastic voice. He rises from his chair and John does to, sensing he should be on his feet for this.

“So what did you do, John?” Sherlock asks as he saunters over and lays a hand on John’s waist and drops his forehead to that strong trapezius. He kisses at it, just above the tee shirt and robe.

“Who did you killed?” He kisses higher, breathing calmly as John hangs on desperately to his self control.

“What makes you so dangerous?” He smiles as he reaches the juncture between neck and jaw. John can feel every bit of the mischievous smile and the words mouthed next.

“What makes you a Freak?”


	9. Coincidence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Donovan stumbles upon something intense.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this might be too sudden, so let me know what you think!

Sally is nervous, though no one can tell. Distractedly, she rubs the pad of her thumb and index together in a slow, contemplative rhythm. She hopes she’s wrong. She really, really does. 

 

…

 

In a posh office, a man in a very nice suit puts down a newspaper, takes a final drink of his tea, and reaches forward to press the button on his phone.

“Mary, I’m going out. Reschedule today’s meetings, yeah?”

“Yes, sir.” He releases the button, collects his jacket, and rises. Whoever is offing his colleagues and underlings is interesting indeed. Alas, he cannot be allowed to continue.

 

…

 

Sherlock stood in the quiet granted by being stories above the rest of London. He can still hear the noise of the city, but it’s different from up here; quieter, calmer, less chaotic. He likes it. It reminds him of waking up with John, or those dark moments when he’s about to sleep, or that time when Mycroft checked him out of the institution instead of his mum and they stayed in a hotel together while Sherlock played the violin and slept and Mycroft did work. Those were the quietest moments Sherlock had had in a long time. Then he got another assignment, and his big brother saw him to the airport. 

He didn’t realize until later, when he recalled the perfect stillness brought on by silent company, that they’d done that for Sherlock to gain a peace of mind he’d lost entirely the day of his presentation in the hallway of his school. It was a good idea and done perfectly. 

The cool air of the current day nips at his cheeks, only heightening the feeling of peace. He hums quietly to himself while he waits, ignoring every thought that drifts through his head. His doubts, his fears, his deductions, his everything is no longer the focus for the time being.

“Day-dreamer, sittin’ on the seat, soakin’ up the sun and feelin’ up his girl like he’s never felt a figure before...” rolls off his tongue like water over smooth stones. Truth be told, he’s always liked music. He used to listen to everything- and sang anything he could get away with vocalizing, too- until he realized just how potent his voice could be. Then, he’d only play it. 

Renditions of Michael Jackson songs mixed with Adele and Ed Sheeran were drawn from four strings and a bow. And rap. The genre was confusing, since what was glorified was not what was good, but eventually he found his way to Tech N9ne’s Fragile, Eminem’s 8 Mile Road and Writer’s Block and more. Straight Out the Gate must have been replayed thirty times on an evening when he just couldn’t calm down. All of this was mixed in with the Arctic Monkeys (Do I Wanna Know? When he first met Victor Trevor, and Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High? For later), the Black Keys’ Little Black Submarines seemed to speak to his inability to make anyone happy. And, of course, old songs, too. Everything Beatles could fill an entire day, depending on his mood, Etta James’ At Last and Bill Wither's Ain’t No Sunshine was his early education concerning what it’s like when someone loves you back for you; when you’re not the problem. Smells Like Teen Spirit had been good to him, especially when he found out how Kurt Cobain died.

Nowadays, he only really listens to classic music, which had only ever been in the background before. He comes back to himself and realizes that he’s actually started on a new song.

“I just wanna say that they don’t really care about us,” he sings, trying for the odd staccato of Jackson’s voice.

“And who is ‘they?’” Sherlock turns around and realizes that he has company, now. Right on time, though he neglected to actually look at said time.

“Most Naturals, for one thing. People like you, for the second.” The man across from him holds a hand to an emotionally wounded chest. 

“People like me? Why would we not care about you?” Sherlock recalls a talk show he’d heard at some point. Odd that he’d kept that information in his head all these years later. 

“Because people like me are seen from the use down, not the life up.” The original sentence had been ‘money’ and ‘idea’ instead of ‘use’ and ‘life’ but the basic concept applies. 

“Hmm, mm, mm. You are certainly right about that, but let me ask you one thing…” he drawls. “Do you really think anyone cares about anyone?”

“No… but I know one thing. I know you don’t want to live,” Sherlock says, taking a step forwards the man goes a little slack faced. 

“I know you’re suicidal. I know you want to make your peace and hand in your life. I know you want to jump.” At his sentence, the man is moving towards the edge of the roof. He doesn’t quite stand on the ledge, but he’s just moments away from doing so.

“I am, a bit,” the man says, looking at the traffic sliding by below. He can see a biker going from left to right. A woman with dark hair running into the building. She must be late. 

“Tell me,” Sherlock says.

“What do you want to know? You’ll die soon anyways.”

“I that what you came to do?”

“Yep. You’re such a nuisance, you see. Hardly worth salvaging now. I’m afraid all your usefulness got used up in the war. These past years… how long were you in the asylum? Eight? Nine? Doesn’t matter. These past years have just been a downward spiral. Then, to find out that a clever boy like you threw away your chance at freedom by killing off officials? Well, then you really weren’t worth keeping around.” He says.

“Who ordered my death? Or do you not know?”

“No one, but Magnussen was going to do it anyways…” he says, trailing off as he refocuses on the ground below.

“I always thought it odd, you know. To be up here, knowing that I could order the death of anyone down there.”

“I always thought it odd, too,” Sherlock says companionably as they watch the passers by. 

“Well, then, as much as I’d like to stay,” he says after a minute, “it’s time to go.”

“Ah, yes. It’s time for me to take a nap,” the man agrees nodding. 

“Hmm. Tell me, what’s your name?” at this, the man breaks into a charming, bright smile as he takes a big step in his expensive suit and finds himself on the ledge. Below, people start to point and stop.

“Jim Mor-” The door bangs open and in bursts the woman with the dark hair from earlier. 

“She’ll make you stay awake!” Sherlock says quickly and calmly.

“-iarty. Now, toodles!” and, as Sherlock jumps in front of him to stop Donovan- because it is indeed her- from pulling him back, the officer raises her gun.

“Move, Sherlock!” Moriarty turns around and gets a bit confused. Guns aren’t supposed to be here. Guns are fun. Guns are for his idea of a good time. If there’s going to be good times, he wants to be there. Sherlock turns and pushes Moriarty, and the man falls off the roof to the sound of a single gunshot. 

A moment after Moriarty disappears over the ledge, Sherlock hits the asphalt roof, bashing his head against it. Sally is running to him, above him looking angry and panicked and cold.

“Sherlock!” She yells, but she knows it’s useless.

“Thanks,” he says uselessly before the last of the life slumps out of him. Sally stands and walks to the edge of the roof to stare at the dead man who’s bashed his head open on the pavement below. 

She’d thought it suspicious that the high number of government employee suicides coincided with the release of a man able to give instructions impossible not to follow and with a good reason for that kind of sport.

She sighs and stands. At least this will be his last murder. She pulls her cellphone out.

“This is Sergeant Sally Donovan, and I’m calling in a double death at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, address West Smithfield London, EC1A 7BE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just broke your brains, didn't I?


	10. Welcome Back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John does some dirty business.

John quietly closed the door to the storage room in the back of Speedy’s. The thing was small, boxes of product sitting stacked neatly on sturdy shelves. On the other side, in the main room, Mrs. Hudson sighs and turns back to the store. It opens in an hour. 

John kneels and feels for the seam in the floor and, finding it, jams a strong, flat piece of metal, using his strength (returned in full in the time he’s been out of the institution) to pry the board up enough to grip it. Then he’s hauling up the one on the left, drops his backpack into the hole, and slips in after it. 

In less than two minutes, it’s as if there was no one there at all. He doesn’t need the map Sherlock gave him to find his way through the deep and extensive labyrinth of London’s sewer system (he memorized it). He has it on him anyway, though. One never knows when he’ll have to veer off course. At eleven in the morning, he comes to another ladder below a cover that hasn’t been used in quite a while.

He shimmies up it, tired and stinking of sewer, and gives three long knocks and three short ones. Eventually, the cover’s pulled back.

“Name?”

“Kate.” He clambers up into a small chamber barely big enough to hold the two of them, then further up into the cellar of a rather large house. 

“Is he here?”

“Yes. In the freezer.” Kate says, nodding towards a large and seemingly unused hopechest. John smiles. Sneaky, that. Where better to put in a body than something that looks like it just has useless mementos in it?

“Where’s Molly?” John asks next. A moment later, he’s cutting off his need to hit anything that takes him by surprise as he hears an excited “John!” accompanied by a rush of footsteps, then a strong hug. 

“Hey, Molly.”

“My god, I thought you’d died.”

“Sorry I couldn’t tell you otherwise. Been a bit caught up.” Molly leans back and takes in John’s full beard and regulation-length hair.

“It’s allright. Who is it, today?” she says as she and John move over to the “hopechest”. Molly collects a bucket and a long metal trolley from Kate and pulls it next to the thing. Kate unlocks it and leaves them to lift a cold, frozen bag onto the tray. 

Quickly, John takes the zipper and reveals the body all the way to the feet. Long, dark curls had been brushed out and collected at the back of the neck. The single bullet had been removed, the wound stitched closed by a careful, clinical hand. The skin had been washed, eyes held shut by a cloth tied about them. Someone had taken their time.

“Hey, I just had him through the mortuary a few days ago. He jumped off the… roof,” Molly says as she suddenly comes to a realization that stops her in her tracks.

“We’re resurrecting a serial killer?”

“Yes, though not just any serial killer.” 

“Sorry, but when you say that, I go from Graham Young to Hitler. Tell me I’m doing it wrong.” Molly’s started to sound worried, hands joining and beginning to twist around each other. John gives her a calm look that stops her movements and arrests her errant train of thought.

“This one’s going to set us all free. Are you in or out?” Molly looks at the face of the man- Sherlock Holmes, she mentally reminds herself- a proud jaw and cheekbones encompass a full mouth and lightish eyebrows.

“In.”

“Then let’s begin,” John says as he pulls clear latex gloves on. After inserting a rubber bit from his pack between Sherlock’s teeth, he takes his place at the head of the trolley. John lays gentle hands on either side of the Sherlock’s face and begins to do a long-proven breathing exercise. Rapidly, he ascends into the headspace he needs for this. 

He considers the concept of life. How he has it. How Molly has it. How Sherlock doesn’t, but that he had it and could have it again. He thinks about how he has more than enough and how he should share. How he could do that. All he needed was a bit, after all.

At the first twitch of John’s hands, Molly braces herself. She never knows how they’re going to react to this. Sherlock arches off the table in a seizure. Molly is quick to grab him about the waist and keep him from falling as John twitches on and off. His head is first. A shoulder. The head again in a series. The jaw alone. The elbows. 

Sherlock’s initial seizure dies down and he sinks back down onto the cold metal table and shivers violently, eyelids fluttering open and shut, jaw working, trolley rattling. After several more moments, John opens his eyes and darts around the table. 

It’s a good thing he’s quick on the draw, because Sherlock suddenly sits up and nearly falls off trying to stand. John grabs him and holds him still as he begins to cough, aborted attempts at clearing his throat blooming into full blow, body wracking things. The bucket’s placed between his bare thighs as his stomach starts to convulse and Molly holds his arms down from her side.

“Easy, Sherlock. Come on, spit it all out.” John says, murmurs more soothing than instructing as Sherlock coughs up a glob of phlegm. Another follows, with one after that. Then, his stomach pulses with no cough, which signals the vomit that follows after. 

“Good job. One more for me?” John asks. Oddly enough, the recently dead man works again on a series of hacking and then another pulse of vomit. A few more weak attempts to dispel the last of the dried and coalesced liquid, and he seems to be done. His breath evens out, and he leans more fully into John.

“Good, good. Now we just have to get you cleaned up.” He says. Sherlock nods and spits out the rubber bit. 

“‘M fuckin’ cold.”

“I know, love. I’ll get you warm in a minute. As soon as I know you can stand.” John sets the bucket aside and Molly relinquishes his arms, mentally apologizing for the stark redness that has already begun to bruise. Together, they support Sherlock as the man makes his first, second, and finally, third attempt at standing. When he is as stable as he’s going to get, John leaves him with Molly to pull from his bag a long, beaten up blue robe. He slings it around Sherlock’s shoulders and helps him to tie it. 

“Let’s get you showered, yeah?” A nod. John takes a moment to repack his things and  Together, the trio start the grueling journey up the stairs, headed to the nearest shower, warmest set of clothing, and food that’s easiest to keep down. 

On the way into a bathroom, they’re met by a man with copper hair and superior gaze.

“Doctor Watson, I presume?” The bearded man nods.

“He thought you’d be here.” Sherlock doesn’t turn around but mumbles something like “fatcroft” as the bathroom door closes behind the three of them. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, guys, I'm Supernatural! Even when someone dies, they don't, because I said so.


	11. They Will Indeed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock puts his plan into action.

To say he was somewhat put off by being alive, once he’d coughed up the rest of being dead, washed that smell of his body, and slept for eight or twelve hours (he’d figure it out in a moment), was something of an understatement.

Now, to be fair, he knew exactly what was going to happen, but knowing that the man you’re fucking brings back corpses and asking him to do the same for you and actually having that happen are two very different things. So it was as though he’d just been in a nightmare in which pain was a thing that registered at the moment of his waking, eight or twelve hours after the moment of his raising.

He shot straight up, partially dislodging a firm but not heavy weight thrown loosely across from him and instantly breaking out in a cold sweat. His eyes darted around the room, not-quite-operational brain analyzing the chances that there actually is an afterlife and that he’s been horribly, horribly wrong the entire time.

Then the weight from a moment ago registered. He looks down, seeing the single most grounding sight he’s had in a long time. John’s face lays where it was before he woke, resting against a pillow, dark eyes made more intense by the short hair and full beard. He didn’t seem inclined to move.

“John.”

“Sherlock,” his counterpart acknowledged, at which point Sherlock acknowledged that John’s voice is, indeed, sexy when he wakes up, that John’s body is, indeed, bare, and Sherlock is also bare. 

“Are you wearing pants?”

“Mm hmm,” is the answer. A moment more of staring, and it registers that it’s rather dull and stupid to ask the man that shags and is shagged by you if he's wearing pants. Who cares? With that final realization, gravity kicks back in, and Sherlock’s descending towards the warm spot he left behind, the cooled sweat now cold against his skin.

The weight- the arm- comes back to hold him close again.

“We need a shower,” John murmurs. Sherlock nods. He’s still mildly tired, but he’s too keyed up to sleep now. Besides, he’s also starving, and he had a very good reason for faking his death. It should be realized as soon as possible.

With a shower comes slow, lax groping, but, again, Sherlock is too tired to deal with it the way he’d like to. After the shower, after a wonderfully long session in which John had his capable fingers knuckle deep in Sherlock’s hair with shampoo and conditioner and a brush and then just because he can, comes clothes. 

The clothes are not in Sherlock’s regular style, and yet are. You could say that his “regular style” is dress clothing. Since he’s wearing a suit, you could say that it’s right on the money. But Sherlock doesn’t do pinstripes, so kiss his ass. 

The suit, black on black on black with a broad brimmed hat of the same color. The hat is ridiculous (he doesn’t do hats either), but not in this context, because, under the hat, is a carefully chosen mask with what looks like a spraypainted smiley face on it. His hair had been straightened after Sherlock looked into the mirror and decided that the curls weren’t working, so now it was even longer, all that shrinkage masking black hair (dyed before his jump) that had grown, in his imprisonment, down to his ass and now lay like an eerie curtain against the darkness of his suit. What isn’t covered is black through the use of regular paint. He finds it funny, really, that he was now essentially Gothy the Clown. 

He would hold the attention of a nation with a face like this, though. 

Sherlock is sitting in a room with no windows in the house of Irene Adler, dressed and pressed and ready to go in front of a black backdrop, with solid lighting that threw jagged shadows, depending on where he turned, a camera aimed at him, ready to live stream. At that moment, Mycroft enters the room. Sherlock nods, rises and clasps forearms with him. None of the paint comes off. 

He retakes his place, standing straight and tall, waiting. The lights, which had been turned off, are once again cranked up to that off kilter brightness as Kate enters a command into her laptop, and every screen in the city of London snows for the moment in between the change and the camera feeding into the channel. 

Sherlock smiles behind the hard plastic and tilts his head slightly to the side, the hat’s motion ridiculously exaggerated as he does.

All over London, things slowed down. Bars grew quiet. Stores lost their chatter, leaving the air to be dominated by a few unruly children. People who spent too much time on the internet were shaken out of their odd passivity. Bankers paused their meetings and students in their presentation.

On screen was an odd man in a mask, a three-piece suit, and black paint stared at them a moment.

“Hello, everyone. Allow me to point out your pattern. I am a Freak, you see, and, at this news, sixty percent of you have just gotten very angry, and forty percent of you are very scared now. Now, you sixty, despite not having any other clues to my identity, will now be extra harsh to people living under the threat of institutionalization, simply for being different. You will mob Freak men, and rape Freak women, and hurt Freak children just because you know that I am one of them. 

“Here’s where it gets interesting though, most of the people you will go out and hurt under the justification of the guy in the mask said he’s a Freak are boring, dull creatures just trying to eat tonight. I’m not a part of your life. I’m not apart of their lives. But you will hurt and kill them anyways, won’t you? Because I said this thing.

“What’s interesting, though, is that the more you give into your blind assumptions, the more of a puppet you are. If you attack a man and he attacks you back, that’s your fault. If you try an kill a woman’s child and she kills you, that’s your fault. No one’s going to grieve over your stupidity. But the ones who will gain will lock that woman up and take her baby away. That’s also your fault. Everyone pays. Or do they?

“I have to go now, but when I come back I’ll know exactly how many of you are puppets, and how many of you are done with blind rage and blunt stupidity.” He raises a hand and waives the fingers one at a time like a cartoon temptress.

“Bye, now.” The camera cuts to black, the screens snow, return to normalcy. Sherlock pulls the mask off, lights a cigarette, and takes a long drag.

“You think that did the trick?”

“Hmm we’ll see, won’t we?” he answers. Irene nods. They will, indeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yo, I've been sitting on this for an age. Let me know what you think, yeah?


	12. Interlude: Important Update

This, as you know, is shaping up to be a very complicated story, and, as with all my stories, what you actually see is not what all there actually is. Which is why I'm doing this. Here is my tumblr (https://www.tumblr.com/blog/ambiguousrabbitsclock), which will be an AO3 feed for all my fics. If you have a prompt, an alternate event, a question, or any other thing that just won't make it into a finished piece, feel free to ask me for it there. 

-White Rabbit's Clock

P.S. I'm sorry for the false chapter, but I don't have anything to post right now, sooo...


	13. Evangeline

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Irene's house gets a visitor

Evangeline pulls her knees up to her chest, watching the same video over and over again. Someone had the common sense to record the message the Hat Man gave (or at least, that’s what Evangeline is calling him) and now it’s all over YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, you name it, it’s there.

And now he’s back. He has a coat with an exaggerated collar flipped up around his jaw, and the lines of the face on his mask are solid and slightly lopsided- a bit sheepish, if it were a cartoon. Except it’s not, so it seems as though the _sorry_ feeling the mask gives off is actually _“sorry you’ve got to die. You’re just too irritating to live.”_

She pulls her little knees up to her chest and clutches them close to her, glued to the screen.

“I was right, you know,” the man says, his voice twisted into something it’s not.

“The puppets of London hung a fifteen year old yesterday. He had literal sticky fingers. Tell me: are you proud of yourself, Puppet? Do you feel satisfied, yet? Is your world safer now that one more Year Eleven student is no longer around to hate his math homework?

“I don’t think so. And it’s not because I know you, Puppet,” he says, eerie in the mask and the hat. “It’s because, if you were really safe, you’d be celebrating. But you’re not, because I’m still here, and you took it out on a kid.

“Here’s an interesting question. If Freaks are so dangerous and violent, why is it that you Natural puppets are the one that hung one? You’d think it would be another way, if what you blindly believe is true. Just a question.

“Let’s see who follows the script.” Then the screen cuts to black. Evangeline smiles a bit, because she likes it: Puppet. Is that not what they are? The secret stretch of a thin mouth fades back into a small, private scowl, because she knows exactly what she wants now.

Somewhere in the house, she hears a door shut. Her internet connection gets faster. The creak of old matter settling alerts her to a lack of movement. Quickly, she presses the power button on her laptop and clambers into bed, reaches out a hand to turn the rain machine up, and closes her green eyes against the gloom, waiting in her long undershirt and short shorts.

The door creaks open. There is silence. Then it shuts again.

For an hour, she lays still in her bed, heart pumping fast in her chest, mind racing, breath deliberately slow. Then she’s moving, making no sound when she slides out of bed and into thick black cargo pants. She pulls the undershirt off and pulls a small sports bra over her naked torso, followed by deodorant and and dri fit and topped off with a black and red soft plaid shirt and short black jacket.

Black work boots that she had to look for forever to find in her size are tied together by the laces underneath her bed. She pulls them out and sets them next to the bag. Ballet shoes are slid onto her feet, ribbons tied well and carefully.

The laptop is slid into the padded, slim case and stowed in the slot of the backpack she had paid extra for. An mp3 player, switchblade, and money are all stuffed into different pockets of her pants. The only thing she puts there is her phone. The chargers are already wrapped carefully and stowed into the bag, along with a couple of portable batteries. She looks around her room one last time to make sure she hasn’t left anything.

Then, she slings the backpack onto her shoulders quietly, and pulls the tools out from underneath her pillow. The first thing she addresses is the fact that her window has an alarm on it. A couple of weeks ago, when the first message came out, she really set to escaping this blasted house. Using her compass, she figured out eight days ago that the alarm uses a magnet, and that the magnet is negative. After that, it was just a question of getting a positive magnet from the store to replace the one on the window.

She pulls the gum, which she had slipped in right before she rose, from her mouth and sticks the magnet to the alarm with it. Carefully, she unlatches the window and slides it up. It goes soundlessly, as she had already oiled it. Then, it’s simple work to slip through the window and away into the night.

Her heart pumps hard in her heart as she closes the window and beats it out across the roof, makes the jump over to the next, slightly lower building, collects a duffel on the way, and makes the harrowing series of jumps down to the ground using thick, well made windowsills.

She grins as she runs off into the night. She’s finally going, and it’s not to a place that comprises her nightmares. No, it’s to something much, much better.

 

…

 

“What do you mean, there’s a kid?” Sherlock says as he sits in the window seat of his and John’s shared room. John leans in the doorway, already dressed for the day. Their room, on the second floor of Irene’s house, has windows that face the east. The early morning sun backlights his messy bed head, still straightened from last night’s broadcast. A few of the strands have begun to wave.

He slips the lighted cigarette that came from a half-used pack between his lips and takes a contemplative pull on it. Silver-grey smoke slips in a thin, mesmerizing stream above his head.

“I mean, a kid broke into the house at four something or so and wants to know if we intend to, and I quote, ‘broadcast the shit out of the internet until we get caught’ unquote.” John says walking over and neatly plucking the small thing out of Sherlock’s hand and taking his own drag on it. He hands it back.

“What kind of kid?”

“Short, maybe five feet. Female, redhead, hair cut short, fifteen or sixteen, androgynous.” Sherlock nods. He’s never heard of the kid before, but she’s already made quite the impression for herself.

“Why’d she turn up here?” John shrugs.

“My guess is she comes from a bad place. Rolled in with a backpack and a duffel bag. Sat in a breakfast nook like it wasn’t a thing.”

“You think she’s a freak?”

“I think she cares. It doesn’t show if she is, though.” John replies, gaze pinned on the sky around the rising sun. Sherlock sets the cigarette butt into the glass ashtray near his knee and rises.

“I suppose I should go meet her, then.” John watches as Sherlock drops pajamas and pants for a black pair of each.

“Yes… in other news, that kid you talked about- the one with the fingers? All over the internet. Activist groups are sucking it up.” Sherlock nods. Everything is going according to plan. He wanders into the bathroom to restraighten a couple of escaped strands of hair, tosses the rest over his shoulders, finishes getting dressed and pulls another cigarette from his pack.

Technically, you’re not supposed to smoke indoors, and technically, he doesn’t care. He smiles. He always has liked the idea of young masterminds getting places.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eh? Eh!? Watcha think of that?


	14. Affinity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock talks. Donovan talks. Lost of talking.

The kid’s got balls, if nothing else. On the one hand, she’s got on red ballet shoes and combat pants, which tells Sherlock that she is desperately clinging to the idea that she is capable and that she is not in over her head. 

On the other, there may be something to this clinging, if she can actually use that switchblade she’s got ready. Sherlock takes a bet and takes a seat across from her at the dining room table Irene had had her moved to.

“What’s your name?”

“Evangeline.”

“Why’d you break out of your own house?” The kid smirks and produces a clear plastic container that’s supposed to protect an SD card. In it is a bunch of pills, all of them looking like ibuprofen.

“I stopped taking my meds, and, low and behold, I started doing some freakish shit.” Sherlock pulls the container across the table to him, moving a few hairs behind his ear as he leans over it. Interesting.

“Like what?” he says, raising his head to look her in the eyes. Evangeline opens her mouth, and milky white fangs extend from all eight cuspids and bicuspids. They catch the yellow light of the chandelier and gleam dully. 

“Those have poison, or are they just fangs?” Evangeline closes her mouth and then smiles. The teeth have returned to normal.

“Wouldn’t know. Haven’t bit anything yet.” Sherlock gives a one-sided smile. Yet. Someone’s confident.

“And you think the pills have something to do with it?”

“I’m sure.”

“Then I’ll test them,” Sherlock says as he whips the container off the table and into his pocket before Evangeline’s suddenly clawed hand can stop him.

“How do I know you’ll actually test them?”

“You don’t. Showing all of your cards is a bitch, isn’t it?” Evangeline just gives him a look.

“In related business, there’s still you.”

“I want to help you.”

“By doing what?”

“I can shape shift, and when I do, it’s real. At the very least, you’ll eventually have use for a dopplegänger. Of anyone you want.” Sherlock gives her a closer look. She’s not going back. No matter what happens tonight, this kid is officially homeless.

“Fine, you can stay. But we do things my way. You start acting like a loose canon and you can take your ass back to whatever place you broke out of to get here.” Evangeline nods sharply and her face breaks open in a silly grin. 

She did it.

 

…

 

Donovan’s alarm clock wakes her up at six thirty. Mechanically, she rolls out of bed and into her bathroom, where she brushes her teeth, washes her face, combs what hair she has and puts on deodorant. That done, she wanders back to her room to slide into her uniform and checks her gun before holstering it. Another five minutes, and she’s headed out of her house, a banana in her stomach and coffee waiting at the station. 

When she gets to the station, she’s greeted by the secretary (Laurel, she recalls) pressing a cup of coffee into her hand. 

“You don’t have time. First meeting room.” Sally nods and pulls out her phone as she walks on. Of course she didn’t check her phone on this of all mornings. She swipes up to open a text from Lestrade.

 

7:02 a.m.: **the feeler will evaluate you.**

 

She takes a deep breath, crams the donut in her mouth, follows it up with coffee, then opens the door. The feeler that had been assigned to Sherlock and promptly removed from the Yard’s premises sits in his suit and ego. 

He looks at her as she steps inside.

“Good Morning, Mr. Wellis.”

“Miss Donovan. If you’d take a seat.” She does, sinking down with the grace of a pitbull and taking another drink. The heat is fortifying.

“What you did is admirable, Miss Donovan. Heroic, even, going after a known sociopath and career criminal like that.” Donovan nods, waiting.

Wellis flips another page in his file.

“There’s just one problem, though. It says here that you are the one who originally made this offer of… “freedom” to Sherlock Holmes. It says that you are the one who knew where and how he was kept. So, tell me: if you knew he was mad, why did it take so long for you to figure it out?”

“I thought he would stay away from murdering; it’s not something he ever did when he worked with the Yard before his diagnosis. I did not think it was him until a very specific pattern started to emerge.”

“And the roof? You waited a hair too long up there, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t want to fire my gun at an unarmed civilian.”

“He’s a freak.”

“One whose abilities rely entirely on sound. I was wearing earplugs.”

“Are you sure you didn’t have some kind of affinity?”

“Yes,” she says, and pauses, as if she doesn’t know that Wellis wants a why. He is digging for something and Donovan doesn’t know what. So she goes with what would have been the truth, in another life.

“He is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. I no more wanted him alive and walking around free than I want cancer.” The feeler looks at her for a long moment, eyebrow cocked, before rising.

“Very well. Thank you for your work and help, Agent Donovan. If you have any questions, feel free to call.” he says, setting a card down in front of Donovan. She pockets it and rises. She doesn’t know if she’s just dodged a bullet, but she knows this won’t be the last of it. Not by a long shot.

After all, what affinity could Donovan have to a free, murderer, and madman?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whelp, that took for fucking ever. Let me know what you think:)


	15. Marketing Campaign

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone's favorite psychopath has some fun. Evangeline tries to remember stuff.

Evangeline sat on a chair, one foot resting on the seat with the knee tucked underneath an elbow, skin slowly morphing into and out of velvety black fur. She’s staring at a blank spiral notebook, trying to write and failing. Sherlock glances up from his laptop.

“No one would throw stones if you were to take a more comfortable form.” John, in the chair next to him, cocks the insides of both eyebrows at her, as if to say, “he’s right, love”. Evangeline watches both of them before rising up and walking away.

Five minutes later, she returns… cuter than she was before she left, which is no easy feat. Small, delicate looking hooves clop quietly over the wood floor of the dining room. The triangular ears have not grown in length, but rather gained a soft-edged leaf shape. The black fur seems to have decided to stay, with her copper hair a little wilder than it was before.

“A satire,” Sherlock says, eyeing the goat’s nose that twitches at the name. She’s only wearing a tee-shirt, which is understandable, given that the fur is thick at crotch and fades above the waistline.

“Yes,” she says as she pushes aside the chair and proceeds to write standing up. Sherlock smiles. That’s one distraction taken care of.

 

…

 

The following day, Evangeline stands in the full length mirror in the bedroom loaned to her by Irene and closes her eyes. Sometimes this does better when she’s in front of something reflective. The dark-light of eyelids against a fully lit room throws her balance off slightly, and she begins to rock slightly on her feet as she tries to remember.

 

…

 

Hide and go seek. That was the game she played a very long time ago. She must have been three or four. She must have been just old enough to remember. The house was small and cramped; lots of hiding spots for a tiny child. 

Unfortunately, who ever was with her knew all her places, so she had to find something else. Something smaller. Something… when she opened her eyes again, she was at least a full two feet shorter. She scuttled into the lean to made up of a hard chess board and the beaten up chair someone sat in every night.

Somewhere else in the flat, someone yelled that they are coming. She tried to remain quiet and still. She tried to remain motionless.

Two feet, pale with indoor play and dirty with a lack of supervision trotted into view and stopped above a few pieces of fabric, one of which was fluffy. That was her tutu right there… she moved to take it back, forgetting the game for the moment. 

A high scream brings someone else into the room as Evangeline tried to wrestle herself back into her clothes. She was not very good at it yet. She couldn’t move her arm through the hole of the undershirt. She’s not sure when her clothes got so big.

A startlingly painful kick to the ribcage sent her flying back into the chair. She looked up, ribcage hurting, into the scared and defensive face of a the babysitter, already on the phone with someone else. 

Distantly, she heard her say something about a freak. 

It was the last day she saw her flat.

 

… 

 

Evangeline blinked. That one is new. The door opens with a quiet knock, and Kate’s head appears. 

“Meeting, love.” Raven follows her out of the room and into the dining room she’d been brought to two days ago. Sherlock, typing on his laptop, looks up at her entrance before turning the computer around. 

“This is Euclides Break, a Freak with skin that can turn to stone. We’re going to collect him.”

“For our cause?”

“No. And yes. It depends on the way you look at it. On the one hand, England will know of the exploit, but Break himself will be gotten out of the country, or the city, depending on where he wants to be.”

“Where’s he held at?” John asks. Sherlock told him none of this before now.

“Bethlam.”

“Sounds like fun,” Irene purred from her seat.

 

…

 

It was, indeed, fun. For Sherlock anyways. He ditched the hat- too big for a heist- at the house, and just went in his mask and black uniform, same as the rest. The asylum, though both notorious and well guarded, wasn’t much of a match for Sherlock, and Break was collected without a hitch.

It was the after, however that was the best.

Thanks to Mycroft’s skills, they pulled the security video of their breaking in and broadcasted it online, under the YouTube channel that the previous two videos had been posted under. 

Six hours later, after Break had been safely deposited on a ferry headed to the mainland and the team had arrived back at the house through the tunnels, Sherlock dropped trou and everything but his pants before collapsing back against the soft covers on the bed. John sat, shoeless and down to a black tee shirt and pants, and just looked at him for a moment, taking in his grin.

Then he leaned down and kissed him, right above the bellybutton, again at the diaphragm, all the way up to his mouth.

“Who’s next?”

“Depends on the general reaction. I have a couple lined up, but we may need another video first. Besides, I’m waiting on a certain change in the game that should be happening soon enough.”

“Yeah?” John said, running his nose ‘round the shell of Sherlock’s ear.

“Yeah…” the detective trails off as he gets lost in the sensation.

Fun, indeed.


	16. Albino

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock remembers and the cause gains a new member

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been a while. I had writers block for this work.

It’s dark by the time Sherlock makes his move, dropping below Irene’s house and into the dry tunnels and catacombs underneath London to wander, and to find his network; a network that had been there before his incarceration, and one that Mycroft had carefully cultivated and grown.

In the shadowy, echoing tunnels is where Sherlock catches wind of an albino who seems too posh for homelessness. In this way, Sherlock found himself facing, for the second time, Mr. Euclides Break. He is, when Sherlock first sees him, against the wall, dressed in all black, waiting. Sherlock, head covered by a hoodie, sidles up to him and takes his own place against cold brick. 

“For some reason, I thought you were being ferried to the mainland,” Sherlock says, almost to himself. Euclides smirks.

“Well, I thought that, too, but then I realized that I’ve lost the plot if I’m going to skip out on the most interesting thing that’s ‘appened since the War.” Sherlock nods.

“It will be dangerous, and I can’t guarantee your safety or life.”

“Aye. So’s a mad’ouse, yanno,” he Euclides answered. Sherlock shrugs. Smiles. Turns and holds a hand out. They clasp arms.

“Come on, then.” The two push off the wall and turn to begin the long walk back to the house. As they walk, Sherlock thinks about the War. What he did. Who he did it for.

 

…

 

It was one of those days that looked like summer but felt like late winter. Green grass and plant life bloomed where it would, and the temperature was just shy of low enough to sustain frost. Sherlock, now nineteen years old, is very pale. He has not been outside in quite some time. Black sunglasses shield silver eyes, and a heavy coat keeps him warm. 

It has been what feels like an age since that day in school. He buys a coffee with a fiver and takes a seat on a bench, waiting. He’s joined by another boy, a few years younger than him, with white hair. 

“My name is Samuel. I’ll be your companion for the day.” the boy says. Sherlock takes a drink of coffee.

“Okay. My name is Sherlock. Don’t talk or touch me.” He stands and moves off, headed back to the black car he’d just escaped from. They’re headed to Alpha, the first of several English strongholds in the no man’s land surrounding the England-Scotland border. They’ve found themselves a prisoner there.

Followed by the albino, Sherlock gets back into his seat and clicks the seatbelt into it’s socket. He can feel himself being watched. 

“You know what to do?”

“Yes.” By the time they get where they’re going, the drink is gone, and Sherlock has pulled out a small thing of mouthwash, gargled it, and spat it into the cup.

Alpha is as depressing as everything else these days; a big, tannish building with tall chain link fences interwoven and topped with barbed wired. The black sedan slides smoothly into and through the checkpoint. As they go, Sherlock palms a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in one hand. By the time they get out of the car, he’s pulling on a thin white stick, pale silver smoke rising above carefully cultured and dark blue belstaff. 

“Are you supposed to be smoking?” the albino asks as he easily keeps pace with Sherlock’s long gait.

“Is anyone supposed to smoke?”

“... fair enough,” he says quietly as they’re met at the entrance to the building by a man on the same level as the two guarding the entrance. He steps out past the guards and holds out a hand to shake. Sherlock glances at it, then up at his face.

“I don’t do hands.” A nod.

“My name is-”

“Natural James Morgan, in your tenth year in the army, and recently widowed. Where is he?” the guard’s look doesn’t change, but Sherlock knows he won’t go for conversation for the remainder of the visit. 

“IDs?” The pair produces said IDs and are promptly led deep into the building and, if Sherlock was not mistaken, under it to a small interrogation room where an older soldier sat, cold and hungry and hunched over, chained to a metal table. 

“His name is William T. Spears. Here’s his file.” Mr. Morgan said as he handed over a manilla folder. Sherlock read through it, committing every piece of information to memory. Then he opened the door.

As he entered the room, the albino with him- Break, Euclides Break, Sherlock reminded himself. He saw the ID- the man looks up. He was gagged and could barely breath with it on, nevermind let out screams so earsplitting as to deafen you. Literally.

“Mr. Spears.” Sherlock said, taking a seat. His voice had gone soft as velvet, eyes half closed and mesmerizing.

One of the hands moved into the distinct shape of a middle finger. Sherlock grinned. He reached out and gripped the hand, effortlessly holding the soldier in the avenue of his gaze. 

“Don’t ever use your abilities, and tell them everything you want to know.” The man went slack in the face and the mind for a moment. Sherlock’s work done, he rose, straightened his belstaff, and left the room.

“There. You can ungag him now.”

 

…

 

“You’re a lot calmer than you used to be, mate,” Euclides says as they near the entrance to the attic. Sherlock turns around and holds out a blindfold. 

“Sorry, but I don’t trust you.” Break smirks and ties the blindfold. Sherlock takes his hand and leads him on a long, scenic circuit to the entrance, then helps him climb up the ladder and into the basement. He doesn’t unveil their location until they’re standing deep in the house.

“Welcome to the cause.” Irene says as she leans against the wall, watching the handsome albino. 

It gives Sherlock a pause. He’d never thought of it as a cause. 


	17. The Clinic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang goes and makes trouble.

When Sherlock and John were first released, breakfast was a quiet affair which often meant that John made tea and ate toast in the kitchen, and then Sherlock came in directly after to eat his. They rarely talked, and the crackle of a newspaper was more prominent than any vocals. Now it’s fucking loud. 

The clip-clop of Evangeline’s hooves can be heard before the door opens, the energetic youth skidding into the room on the slippery wood of Irene, who follows at a more sedate pace. Sherlock can tell by the look on her face that she’s done something mischievous.

Evangeline’s breath is loud as she catches it, and she immediately grabs a plate off the stack at one end of the table and begins to collect the fried eggs the waitstaff that none of them ever see made. The plate sufficiently full of both that and bacon, she pulls the backpack off her back and shoves the sketchbook she has in front of Sherlock, wanting him to look at a cartoonized version of himself, her velvety ears flicking in excitement, small mouth stretched in a genuinely happy smile. 

Sherlock nods; as much of an approval as he will give, though inwardly he’s quite pleased. Evangeline’s good. It’s enough for Evangeline, who sets the book down and looks at the article Sherlock’s reading. Irene walks behind Sherlock, tangling her fingers into long, carefully combed curls. Sherlock shakes his head with a look of annoyance.

“I know you love that,” Irene teases as her hand slides away again. John rolls his eyes, which can be seen over the top of his own newspaper.

“What you know is that I don’t want you touching me,” Sherlock responds drily.

“Besides,” Kate says from the doorway, “I’m way better for that sort of thing.” Evangeline chokes on air. Kate collects her own breakfast (she’s a vegetarian, Sherlock guesses). He pulls out a cigarette and lights it, passing it to John after a long pull on it. 

“So… what are we doing?” Break asks as he enters the dining room, already in possession with a cup of coffee.

“Same thing we do every day,” John says as a silver plume of smoke escapes his mouth, “try to take over the world.” Sherlock smiles as he snaps his newspaper up.

“On a more serious note,” says Irene, “I heard through the grapevine that Cicada’s released a new batch of RIFs,” Everyone in the room stills at the news. Cicada is the branch of government in charge of Freak incidents. They run most of the asylums and prisons that hold Freak prisoners. An RIF is a Rehabilitated Insane Freak.

Sherlock and John were both used by them. Irene and Evangeline went through the system. Break was in the system at the time. Sherlock finds himself watching the youngest member of their little band. There’s something she wants to know, and she’s not comfortable asking it. In the silence that follows, she works up the nerve to meet the eyes of the middle distance.

“Does… does everyone lose memories?” Irene shakes her head, but Sherlock answers.

“No. That particular… treatment came into effect very recently, and, as far as I can tell, is used only on those under twenty years old.” Evangeline seemed to internalize this before she looked up sharply.

“So who are we kidnapping?”

 

…

 

The moon is high, full and round, although invisible above the heavy cloud cover and thick, cold rain that seems to fall endlessly. A white van pulls quietly through the streets, the words “Reynolds Plumbing and Heating” emblazoned on the side, the license plate owned by the aforementioned Reynolds. In nine hours, when a senior plumber comes out to collect his car and head to southern London to check out a burst pipe, the van will be reported missing.

For now, though, it is occupied by three people and their gear. A block away from a nondescript building that says Whitechapel Emergency Clinic, the van parks. A man gets out. He’s dressed in rags, a beanie hiding his frankly ridiculous amount of hair. He’s got a knife somewhere and a wrench somewhere else. His hands, which he’s used makeup on to give them a ruined look, are semi wrapped in rags.

A fake scraggly beard looks like he’s had it for weeks. He walks with a limp, as though he’s something of a marionette with one short string. He begins to walk away, the smell of alcohol mixing with cigarette smoke. 

The second person to step out of the van is invisible. He shuts off the car and gets out of the driver’s seat to follow. The third is a small bird that flutters out of the window and watches them from afar. 

The man limps, ragged and hungry, in through the sliding shatterproof glass doors. He goes up to the front counter and, in a heavy, afflicted slur, says:

“N’d r’m.” The woman gives him a quick glance, and Sherlock (as it’s just him in disguise) deduces her disgust and self importance.

“Are you injured?”

“‘Coh’l,” he slurs at her, keeping his expression dim and his eyes cloudy. The woman seems to snap into duty mode, as she passes a clipboard under the opening at the bottom of the glass divider.

“Please fill that out, sir.”

“R’m.” Sherlock says.

“Sir?” His head sways first back, than forth.

“Room,” he finally forces out.

“This is a clinic, sir. We don’t do ‘rooms’ unless there’s something very wrong.”

“Room!” he yells, frantically going for the door. It was unlocked and Sherlock flung it wide open and ran down the hallway, only to be caught and dragged out by two orderlies. Break, having been offered his chance, slips in quietly behind them, a small mouse clinging to his neck. He tried not to shiver. It’s just Evangeline. He’s not going to get rabies.

While Sherlock is doing his very best to get his “drunk” ass arrested, the two quickly follow Irene’s purloined directions to the very back of the complex. After five minutes, the two are able to slip through the door on the heels of a particularly fast moving guard who flung the door wide after keying his code. 

They follow this guard across the small closet-like space and into the elevator, riding with him down to the… damn. Third floor. They’ll have to wait. Three passengers later, one of the orderlies keys the second floor, and Break shares an inner sigh of relief with Evangeline. They had begun to grow worried. 

They follow the orderlie through a broad hallway, throughout which are doors. Evangeline reads each one silently and figures out the number they’re looking for is to the left, which has all of the odd numbers, and  not to the right, which has the even ones. At room 111, Break stops and waits.

The orderlie disappears through a door in the back of the hall and comes back five minutes later, bearing what looks like a stack of… paperwork? Evangeline guesses that it has something to do with Sherlock’s distraction. While he’s gone, she turns herself, with some pain, into a fly and flutters in behind him. 

She’s tech savvy, and Irene’s managed to collect a couple of useful bits of information. Evangeline will be able to play the camera on a loop long enough to get Break and their target out of the hospital. 

She buzzes into a door marked SECURITY on a modest door plaque. It’s open enough for her to get in. There’s a lone guard watching a debacle on the EXAM ROOM 1 screen. Evangeline takes just a moment to calm herself before she rapidly grows bigger, sprouts scales as she drops around the guards shoulders and wraps around her throat, squeezing until unconsciousness takes the natural. Then her fingers are flying over the keyboard, rapidly bypassing different screens to loop the video footage on all cameras, giving Break no less than ten minutes. But most likely no more, either. 

She fits back through the door, and down the corridor, into the elevator, which has mysteriously opened up for her. She flies through the door and out into the night, rendezvousing back at the van with Sherlock, who’s switched disguises fairly quickly, and waits there for Break. It’s there that she shifts back into her furred form. Doing so is like taking off history’s worst version of the corset, cinched way too tight.

At the open back doors, a bedraggled and hungry girl of fifteen suddenly materializes wearing a hospital gown. Her skin is dark, as are her eyes and short, wavy hair. She climbs in in her green hospital gown, and Sherlock hands her a coat to wear. The door shuts, Break climbs into the driver’s seat, and they drive slowly off into the night. 

As they rock slightly with the movement of the van, Sherlock grins. He knew it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hahahahhaahaa left ya'll hanging!


	18. Medication

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock has a chat.

The War of the Turn was no joke. Donovan knows that much. She remembers the day condition of her society became her personal problem.

 

…

 

Sally turned another page in 1984, set pen to paper and wrote Noah’s Ark next to a portion of the text she’d underlined. She flipped the page, moved her long hair out of her face for the hundredth time, and continued reading. She needed to power through the thing so she could write her assignment.

She looked up at the opening of a door elsewhere in the apartment. Quietly, she shut the book and eased off the bed, creeping down the hall to listen to the words of a man in a black suit. Listened to him tell her mother what Sally had worked to hide from her. Listened to him dismantle her life. She turned and walked back to her room. 

Sally pulled the biggest backpack she had out of her closet and began to put her valuables in it. Anything she couldn’t live without, plus a change of clothes and seven different pairs of socks, eight pairs of underwear, and four sports bras. She supposed she won’t be playing football anymore.

By the time the man knocked on her shoddy little door, Sally was ready. She slung the backpack over her shoulder, smoothed a hand down over the long sleeved dri fit and black genes and big boots she’d changed into, and opened the door.

“Sir.”

“Miss Donovan. I see you’ve packed.” Sally glanced back at the book. At 1984. Orwell was right, she supposed as the door to her house closed behind her for the last time. Then again, someone always is. 

The car had pulled up outside of a nondescript building that did not announce its purpose. Sally was taken through the doors, into an elevator, and down into a long, broad hallway with doors evenly spaced along either side. 

She was led to a room and left to get comfortable. A week later, after she’d been checked and tested and pronounced healthy and very much in possession of the gene they were looking for, she was brought into a small, narrow room that looked over one with one way glass. At a metal table and playing with a rubics cube was a skinny lad with too much hair.

“Miss Donovan, I’d like you to meet Sherlock. You’ll be his handler.” Just then, he seemed to look directly into her eyes, despite the fact that he couldn’t see through it. Mercurial irises had a haunting look to them, and Sally knew, right then and there, that this kid was like no other.

 

…

 

Sally rolls over again, unable to sleep with her restless state of mind. She yawned, hoping that she get tired enough to bypass this thoughtfulness and get to sleep before three. Just as her mind began slipping away (at last), she finds herself jolted back to consciousness, out of bed, and slipping through the door, a Louisville slugger clutched in one hand. 

Someone is here.

Down the narrow hallway, past the bathroom, the laundry room, the closet, and out into the small living  room of her flat she creeps, not so much as the air aware of her presence. 

She sees a man with his back turned, examining something in the dark. She rushes him and swings that bat as hard as she can, only for the man to duck out of the way.

“Jesus, Donovan! This is the second time!” A familiar, all too deceased voice says. Sally backs up and flips on the lights, exposing the figure to be the one and only and definitely not dead Sherlock Holmes. She hefts the bat.

“Calm down, I just have a question.”

“You’re dead.”

“Probably, but not until the near future. Did you have a niece at some point?”

“What?”

“A niece. One who disappeared or went into ‘treatment’ or something.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I kidnapped her some hours ago.” Sally’s grip tightens along the slender metal handle.

“And I believe that you are also on medication for depression, or some other common, well known mental illness that you may actually have and are taking two medications because of, though you only need one.” Sally lowered her weapon.

“How. Do. You. Know.”

“I was on the same thing. They’re a drug that’s been used to keep Freak abilities from surfacing again or even manifesting at all. You know they’ve recently started wiping memories?” Sherlock says.

Donovan’s heart beats hard in her chest. She… She loves Sugar Donovan, daughter of Michael Donovan, Sally’s brother that she lost to cancer. They took her away some time ago. Sally has only been able to see her infrequently. It’s been three months since they last were together.

“No. I didn’t know.” Sherlock takes this as permission to take a step closer.

“Then I propose a deal.”

“What deal?”

“I’ll take you to see your niece, and you don’t breathe a word about any of this.”

“That’s it?” Sherlock nods.

“That’s it.”

“And if I choose to report what I already know?”

“Then that would be a shame.” Sherlock replies, and Sally can hear the menace in his voice.

She thinks long and hard, recalls how, when the original feeler was around, he payed a lot of suspicious attention to Sally, as though the officer and investigatee were in cahoots. 

She remembers when, much to her relief, they gave her new medication, since her old ones weren’t working anymore.

She remembers checking herself into a hospital, and the staff being curiously cold towards her, as if she was a villain, rather than someone trying to get better. She gives a tiny nod, then two larger ones.

“Okay."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EH? EH? What do you think of my plot twist?


	19. The Cause

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sally sees her niece again and John remembers.

 

The reunion was touching; Sally on her knees with her arms wrapped around a little girl with the same kind of hair, the same color skin, the same face.

“Sugar, love, how are you?” But Sugar doesn’t answer. She is crying, snot and tears and spit pouring out of her nose and eyes and mouth and getting Sally’s clothing wet and nasty. Sherlock leaves them alone, going instead to see if there’s tea to be had. He doesn’t like watching shit like that. It makes him think he should be doing something, which is illogical. 

Illogic has cost him a great deal. 

He finds John in the kitchen making tea (thank god). It’s six in the morning, and it’s time to sleep, but Sally can’t stay here tonight, and John won’t go to bed without Sherlock. After all, if the detective isn’t with John, then he could be getting himself killed.

“Wanna go sit in the library?” John rolls his eyes and wraps his arms around Sherlock’s body.

“Be patient. I believe Irene and Mycroft are there already, talking. I’ll watch Sally if you want to go join them.” Sherlock kisses John on the cheek and then steps back, headed towards what is likely to be a strategy meeting. He feels like John should be here. He knows what to do in war. He’s calmer, better, smarter at this than anyone wants to believe. 

Back in a sitting room, Sally and her niece are sitting together, Sugar all but asleep, Sally with her head back, staring off into space, thinking. John takes his own seat quietly, making next to no noise. Eventually, Sally opens her eyes and looks at John.

“What would it take to join this thing of yours?”

“Why do you want to join, first of all?” She looks at her niece, peaceful and asleep, too thin and skin sallow with the lack of sunlight. Treatment had not done her well.

“This can’t go on, John. We fought a war under a system that took everything, including our loyalty,” here, she raises her dark eyes to his, full of emotion and determination, “and we gave it. Our lives and our will and our abilities, only to lose them to that same system like so many cows.”

“Today, my niece had to be kidnapped- a crime, by the way- and I had to deliberately follow a known terrorist and deadman through the catacombs just to see her. I’ve sided with the enemy for family, at the price of my silence. If this is evil, then  we’ve all lost the plot. I want to find it again,” she finishes, running her hand down Sugar’s baby-soft hair.

“And you think we’re just going to save England.”

“I think you’ll make England save itself.” John nods, looking down. He knows what it’s like to see someone doing something and you know that, no matter what the price they pay is, you know that they are where it’s all happening; where the change and the life is at. He remembers, suddenly, that time years ago, when he had hoped for such a person to find him.

 

…

 

Watson carefully tied off the last stitch and set the needle and leftover thread down, straightening for the first time in four hours to look at his handiwork.

They told him this soldier had been the best; brought him video of the man’s training days, his active duty days, whatever they could find to show John Watson, the soldier who could raise the dead, just what they expected of his creation. 

So he had been shipped the parts of the soldier that could be salvaged and then shipped the parts of other people who could replace heart and head, both of which had been blown out by shrapnel. Then, carefully, he set his scalpel down and began to carve away at unuseable parts and mapping out on the other torso on the other stone table on the other side of him.

Then, with the ease of a trade long mastered, he transferred the needed parts to the soldier’s partially hollowed body and walked around the table to the other side of the room, where the fireplace was roaring and cradling, among its coals, a very small branding iron with a circle on one end. He picked up the iron and walked back over to the dead soldier.

Against the skin at his side, just under his rib cage, he marked three dots and, with the side of the iron, a small dash. Right below it, he marked two dots, a small dash, and a third dot. He set the iron down in a steel bucket of water before slipping a rubber mouth guard, big and thick enough to keep the tongue from choking in the throat, into the dark, dank maw.

He tightened the straps on the body, and put away the other corpse before pulling off his gloves and setting his hands to either side of the head.

And he imagined.

He thought of life, how it’s just low amounts of electricity to move the muscles and operate the brain. How the heart and lungs and mind and digestive tract need no conscious thought to run and how the, if you run electricity through a dead limb, it will twitch back to life. He thought about how, without him electricity is just energy with nothing to sustain it. 

He thought about personality, about soul, about experience and, yes, death. He felt his chest and head begin to ache with the effort of having more life than he could use; more life than he needed. Than he knew what to do with. 

And he pushed, a rolling cloud dark power running down his arms and into the man on the table while the body convulsed and spasmed, trying to avoid this unwelcome favor. Sweat broke out on every bit of skin in the room, and, for a moment, John swore on his grave and the graves of his ancestors that he saw heaven, and he saw hell, and he knew he wasn’t going to either.

Then the deed was done, the dead raised, and clear blue eyes blinked awake from his not-so-long slumber. John’s hands fell away and he coughed hard, trying to dispel the phantom feeling of emptiness, as though he didn’t have what he needed anymore. As though he just gave it away. 

His breathing is ragged and his chest rattles with his coughing and pressure builds up in behind his forehead and reddens his skin.

John turned away and drank from a water bottle before unclasping half the straps with a key. He helped the newly living soldier to drink from his own bottle.

“Where am I?” the man says as John brings him a set of clothes to cover his bare body.

“You’re… I don’t know, but you’ve got a few hours to sleep before it’s time to go back to work.

“What work?”

“You’re a soldier aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that work.” He brought the man food as he stood up and stretched his legs.

“I feel like I’m missing something.”

“Aren’t we all?” They ate finger foods- carrots and bananas and egg salad sandwiches.

“You’re avoiding the question.” John shook his head motioned for the man to follow him.

“Why do I have so many stitches?”

“Surgery.”

“But I’m not in a hospital.”

“It was some hours ago.”

“But I was strapped down.”

“You were having nightmares for a while and tore some stitches. Well, most stitches,” John amended, walking over to the far wall, which was done up entirely in cabinets, each of which had it’s own lock and unique key. From the ring in one of his many pants pockets, he picked through the keys until he had the right one. 

Then, he pulled down a bag which had everything this soldier would need in about… he looked at the clock. Eight hours. They would be here in eight hours to pick up their latest request, and the both of them needed to sleep.

“Alright, sir, they’ll be here at ten tomorrow morning for you, and it’s time to sleep. I’ll wake you up in seven. Bedroom’s through here.” He lead Moran through a door near the fireplace, which let out into a small hallway with three more doors. John pointed to the left.

“That door’s the loo,” he pointed at the door a little closer, “and that’s your bedroom.” He unlocked the door.

“There’s a clock, if you’d like to set it. If not, I’ll check for you anyways.” the soldier stepped inside before turning to look back at John.

“I think you’re lying.” John cocked an eyebrow.

“Aren’t we all?” He shut the door firmly and headed to his own room. He’d need to tell them about this, but something inside said not to. The soldier seemed like he would break the cycle. Go berzerker and kill something. Mm, that would be interesting.

 

…

  
And now, he’s older, and if there’s one thing he’s learned, it’s that you have to save yourself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This writer's block is kicking my ass, but here it is! Let me know what you think.


	20. Power Struggle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They fight and blow shit up. 'nuff said.

The day is a rare one where there’s not a cloud in the sky. Light shines down on the city, the dull roar it produces taking a more lively tone with the light. Birds tweet in the trees and passers-by have shed their thickest layers for the shining sun. 

On the many shallow steps of a building, a bomb goes off, spraying concrete and heat everywhere and creating a deep crater. A single man is thrown a few feet, but, other than that, the only damage is to the structure. A few chunks have left dents in the windows, and everyone inside the building is staring out, now deeply afraid.

From out of nowhere, small slips of paper flutter down to the gathering crowd. On it:

 

LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE, NOW

 

Officials begin to flood the area, evacuating. 

In the crowd, a squat man in a light jacket turns and walks away, curly brown hair drawn back in a ponytail, thick, grizzled stubble doing just enough to hide his mouth. With quick strides, he heads off in the direction of the train station. 

 

…

 

When Xerxes wriggles up through the secret entrance at the bottom of Irene Adler’s house, John is waiting for him. The ex-soldier offers a hand, and the two head to the stairs.

“If you are wise, you’ll avoid the library,” John says after inquiring after the little… message sent to the politicians.

“Yeah? Whose in there?”

“The boys are at it at the moment.”

“What’s the fire made of?”

“Strategy. I’m headed in there now. You can join if you want, but it’s not a tea party in there.” At this point, they had drawn nearer the library and paused at junction in the hallway. John is going to go forwards, towards the library. Xerxes looks to the right, then back to John.

“You know, I don’t actually know Sherlock all that well,” Xerxes says thoughtfully.

“But you know something of him.”

“Yeah. We served on the borders. He got prisoners to give up their secrets one by one, and I made sure he was alright. You know: eating, sleeping, companionship, protection. That kind of thing. It started to get to him in the end.”

“Which part?”

“The people. Anything he says, they do.”

“He says that it’s not always the case.”

“No, it isn’t.”

John waits, arching both eyebrows, ready for the continuation.

“So the war’s about three quarters through, right? And we’re in this compound when there’s a skirmish. They capture someone high ranking. It’s good for them, except the man’s good at this whole POW shit. He’s not talking.

“So they pull Sherlock, just as he’s about to leave, down to the room. They just want him to talk, but the man’s diehard. He’s not going to budge without it. They get him in the anteroom. Sat him down. Gave him the brief and then sent him in.

“I’m in there with him, which is how I can plausibly say that this shit actually happened, just so you know. So Sherlock sits down across from him, and he just looks. He saw shit that no one else ever did, even then.

“He started rattling off shit about that man that no one knew. Stuff about his family and his health and things that he couldn’t have known. Then he leans close, crosses just his fingers and puts ‘em up against his chin real smooth like and says: ‘Everything you do tells me something’.”

“Then he mesmerized the man. They come into question the dude, with Sherlock watching, but the guy’s not budging. Sherlock started talking fast, telling him to start talking, to do something, anything, but he’s not doing it.

“Three hours later, the man’s dead of a 120 degree fever.”

“Oh,” John said, voice soft.

“So that’s where he gets the name.”

“Oh yeah. The shit is not a game. Did something to him, too.”

“What kind of something?”

“Last I heard, he got sent back home for stabbing his commanding officer.” John nodded. He’d wondered when Sherlock had gone from military to incarceration. 

“You coming?” he says, indicating the library.

“Oh, you go ahead. Seems like they need a peacekeeper, not a devil’s advocate.” John shrugged and walked off. He can hear the muffled shouting from here. He opens the door to a wall of noise.

“You can’t just set off a bomb, Sherlock!”

“I can, and did, and no one knows who it is.”

“Do you think they won’t find out?”

“Not before it’s too late.”

“Oh, yeah, because that’s a guarantee!”

“What the fuck does guarantee have to do with any of this?”

“There’s a high chance of you getting caught, Sherlock! If you go down, we’re all fucked.”

“Boys,” John interjects, trying to calm the situation down.

“If I go down, we’ll make me a martyr, and you can step back into your cushy life when the blood’s running thick enough.”

“You know full well it’s not about that.”

“Really? Because I do recall you being an excellent liar.”

“Now, you listen here, brother mine, we are a team. Teams work together. You cannot just run off and blow shit up like Guy Fawkes Day and then expect everything to be okay when only half the team’s in on it!”

“And you don’t head this team. I do. You weren’t needed, so I didn’t tell you.”

“No one made you leader, Sherlock, and you might want to ask yourself who disappeared to create the circumstances of your release. Who got all that information on those politicians and knocked the few you couldn’t get to? Who talked to Irene? It wasn’t you, boy.”

“I am not a boy, for one thing, and for another, that doesn’t make you leader. Everything you just named you would have had no cause to do without me. Admit it: You’re a support column, not-”

“Boys! Enough! This isn’t a pissing contest, and we need to figure out our next move,” John interjected for the second time.

“We can kill someone, or do another webcast, but it has to be soon, before the high of today’s work blows away.” Mycroft gives Sherlock one last work.

“If you’re really as important as you think you are, try to remember that it means you, of all people, must live. Think about that the next time you go bomb somebody’s steps.”

 

…

 

Hours and hours after the fact, when Sherlock and John are laying in bed moments away from a shared shower, John runs a hand over Sherlock’s ribs.

“As much as I hate this, your brother is right.”

“About which part?”

“You need to stay alive. I’m warning you now, Sherlock. If you die again, I’m not raising you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! I started and posted the same day. I feel like I'm close to breaking my writer's block guys. Let me know what you think!


	21. Pyrotechnics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock makes another broadcast.

The following morning dawns grey and bright, the big bay windows of the diningroom filtering light through gauzy, white curtains. Through it, the hazy scene of the cold, dead yard caught tight in winter’s grip could be scene, lovely under snow, untrod upon.

Breakfast is as cold as the air outside, and all the hot tea in the world could not fix the temperature. Mycroft and Sherlock, brother’s that they are, do not say one word to each other or even to the others in the room. Last night’s conflict was not calmed with the decision they had come to. 

John and Sherlock are quiet, too. John’s confession had the two of them in quiet knots last night because John will not tell him the reason. With tension like that, it’s damn near impossible to strike up conversation, so Evangeline clops in on her hard hooves and runs away with with a cup of tea and a plate of fried eggs, Xerxes on her heels with his own breakfast already eaten; he was, after all, the first one to the table this morning. Irene does not waste time staying either, so she and Cait have a long breakfast in her room.

John would have left, too, except doing that would have felt cowardly. So he stays and Mycroft snaps his newspaper and Sherlock lights a cigarette and John chases the last of the mash around on his plate.

The latter two leave together. There are things to be done. Sherlock sits down at the vanity in their room and waits patiently. He hates to straighten his hair, which can take upwards of two hours. A soon enough, the plug above the table on the left side is perused, the lights around the mirror switched on, and the window opened so that they would be able to hear the rain when it inevitably began. There was no rain, yet, though, leaving them with nothing, as no breeze blew.

A brush begins to pass through his hair, John’s careful, blunt fingertips easily picking apart whatever knots had found their way to existence during the night. The soft press of a sharp-tipped comb divides his hair in half and then three on each side. He looks in the mirror, meets John’s eyes, and smirks. He looks like he has ponytails from hell. The bottom left section is not tied while a few more passes of the brush picks out one more tiny knot. 

The hair is clipped, and a small chunk held gently in John’s hand. Sherlock feels the hot press of the iron under a centimetre away from his scalp, then the receding heat of a smooth, long slide. The hair falls, straightened. 

They settle into this rhythm, this unclip-smooth-iron, and Sherlock feels something ease in his chest. Whatever John’s not telling him is… infuriating, especially since Sherlock can’t guess it. But this is John. He’s… he’s Sherlock’s partner. They’re in bed together. It’s going to be okay. Besides, it’s not like he’s just going to slit his throat for kicks.

 

…

 

“Pyrotechnics is a wonderful thing, you know.” He says, perching on the stool, staring at the camera through the eyes of his mask. 

“There is evidence that there were pyrokinetics as far back as the neolithic age. At that time, they would have been seen as gods. During the 1692 Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts, none were burned, although there were at least five in the area, ironically enough. Supposedly, one of them actually made the flames leap up and burn so hot that the victim died far faster than she would have otherwise.”

“So, as you can see, the relationship of humans and fire is a tumultuous one. Just like Freaks and Naturals. The War of the Turn is interesting to me, really. Thousands of us fought on your front lines, moving earth, spreading poison gas and, yes, breathing fire. But then the war was over, and you Naturals got scared, thinking that maybe they’d throw their fire at you next. 

“Now some of you got there on your own, but most of you saw news casts. Like this one:” On his right side, a screen appears, upon which a reporter- Maggie something or the other- was speaking.

“And just yesterday a block of flats was set on fire. The speculated cause: a veteran pyrotechnic, just back from the war a few months ago. He has vanished without a trace, so police are pursuing him now.”

The screen fades into another clip, to another person. Sherlock was watching this one last night.

“A skyscraper owned by the Violet Corporation has been bombed today, and it’s believed that the culprit was a level seven mutant with the ability to make bombs. With the rash of superpowered victims, it’s been speculated that maybe these mutants- or Freaks, as some have began to say- should not be so free ranging as us normal people.”

The screen fades to black.

“Hysteria is a powerful tool, you know. It has effects long after you fade. Think about that for a moment.” The transmission cuts, leaving every screen in darkness or snowing before the regular programming cuts back in, leaving the rest of England watching. Wondering. Angry.

Sherlock slides off the stool, removes his hat, and runs his hands through his hair.

“Now that that’s been taken care of,” he murmurs, unzipping his coat as he goes. He finds his way to outside a sitting room somewhere in the middle of the house. In the corner sits a piano. He pauses, listening to the soft, wistful strains of the beginning of Mad World.

He hears a bad note and twists the handle quietly, opening the door so soundlessly that the player does not stop. He can see, by the yellow glow of the five ornate lights in the pale ceiling, that Evangeline is playing, bench pushed out of the way crookedly. Sherlock listens to her, hears the song intensifying. He picks up two more wrong notes, listens to two more corrections, before she gets to the end of the song.

“You’ve gotten better.”

“I’ve been practicing she replies, downplaying her progress. Sherlock takes a seat and listens to her go through a few more songs before he interrupts.

“You want to ask me something.”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“If… If you have th… the chance could you take me to the country one day?”

“The country?”

“I’ve never seen it.” Sherlock gives her a look.

“No promises, but I’ll make it happen if I can.” Evangeline nods, a smile stretching her mouth just enough to be seen. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GUYS. It's been over a month since I gave any time to this work. Jesus, it's been gone. Let me know what you think!


	22. The Explanation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock learns why John won't raise him a second time.

A heavy snowstorm buries the world in white outside the window, while John stands there, gazing out of it. Sherlock sits up in their bed, reading. Or rather, he was. Now he’s just pretending to.

“Something is on your mind.” John gazes out at the window for a while yet before answering.

“We’re not meant to live like this.”

“Like how?” John sweeps a hand out, indicating everything. The vanity Sherlock only has for the camera. The rich furnishings and the plush walls and… well.

“Like this. Alternately playing a game of hysteria and then reading a book in between videos and terror attacks.”

“This is a war, John.”

“Like hell it is,” he says, turning to Sherlock, “I’ve seen war. And this? This game we’re playing with all England? This is not it. In… in a war, you know who the sodding grunts who lose their lives are, and you know who the generals who direct them to their graves look like. All England is fighting itself; their just soldiers who were never meant to see the field.”

“Unorthodox as it is, it’s also very necessary.”

“I know. But this is not war. It’s just terror. And it isn’t right.”

“And you would know a lot about right and wrong, wouldn’t you, D.V.F.?” John stops dead.

“How do you know about that?”

“Mycroft is nosy, and he does his homework well, bastard though he is. There have been a total of six recorded D.V.F.s in English history. Tell me, are they all the same lineage or different? The same person, perhaps. It would explain why you would refuse to raise me a second time, should I be in need of such a favor.”

“It was all me.”

“How did it happen?” John looks away. He’s raised a lot of bodies in his day; from sodding corpses half rotted with natural decay to the formaldehyde-and-cotton soup of the current corpses. It’s all the same. They rise up, they do as he says… but he can’t put them back down. Not without killing them. And if they’ve already died once, well…

“Tell me about it.”

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because that would be breaking my word.”

“To whom?” But John just shakes his head and climbs underneath the covers, effectively ending the conversation. Sherlock reaches around to stroke him from diaphragm to hips, hoping to tempt him. John just curls up tighter, well aware of Sherlock’s brand of persuasion. 

“John…”

“No, Sherlock.”

“Please.”

“Why should I?” Sherlock nuzzles his ear. 

“Because it’s killing me.”

“Funny.”

“It’s killing you.”

“Is not.”

“You just ranted about how this wasn’t a real war. Can you feel their deaths?”

“Ones that I… cause.” he says, words rising almost unbidden to his throat.

“If we’re going to get through this alive, you’re going to have to trust me with this.”

“There’s no reason to.”

“There is. This game isn’t won yet, and we’re going to need something dramatic.”

“This scenario never works out well for me.”

“I swear, I won’t tell anyone. Not Irene. Not Mycroft. Not even Evie.” John turns over to face him, looking into his eyes. In this moment, Sherlock feels far more naked than even laying in bed in the nude allows for.

“My mother’s mother- Emelia Stein- was the german daughter of Klaus Stein, a wealthy businessman who did a lot of business with the British. This led him, eventually, to India, where he established connections to the British East India Trading Company. It brought him into contact with a set of twins Jezebel and John Watson, the two children of Josiah Watson. Business was faltering between the families, and something had to be done.

“Emelia was married to John, Sr., and Jezebel to my uncle on my mother’s side, Heinz Stein. It was enough, and from that many years of good business between the two families followed. In a freak accident, Emelia, then pregnant, was shot  with an M1900 browning. The shock was great enough that she went into labor and subsequently died just before the actual birth. She was resuscitated long enough to give birth, after which her heart stopped one more time before she was revived again.

“By then World War One was in session, and John served in the military, leaving Emelia to heal back on his english estate and giving her plenty of time to… discover things. For one thing, I seemed, in her eyes, less prone to harm, despite coming into contact with just as much as my siblings. She herself seemed unable to hurt herself seriously. 

“Then, one day, Harriet Watson took a fall down the stairs, where she was found by Mum. The grief… was astonishing, and that day, despite being dead for more than an hour, Harriet rose and went on to play another day.

“She started to experiment; saying that she’d had some doctoral training at the hands of her father and a tutor. She wrote of her encounters with the dead. With the living. With saving an already lost life. She used the name of her great grandfather, Viktor Frankenstein to sign her work, so that, if they were ever found, she could deny ownership or the occult.

“When I discovered I had the same peculiar gift to raise the dead, I went on to become a doctor, and I signed my own papers D.V.F. 

“So now you have it,” John said, lowering his face down and borrowing close to Sherlock once again.

“And the other part?” John doesn’t even try to avoid the question.

“When I was in my early twenties, I lived in a small flat with a man named Michael. He was dear. Dearer than was allowed. But we kept it hidden well, as we had started out with a certain degree of animosity that we just continued to maintain outside the home. But in any rate, I was desperate; Michael had been gambling, and had suffered a pistol wound because of it. In the small hours of the morning, as his heart past the point of no return, I brought him back.

“Later that same year, Michael was attacked by a gang. Lost his life and an eye. I raised him a second time. But he didn’t die when he was supposed to. I wound up knocking him unconscious with chloride and burning him alive until there was nothing left to recover.”

Sherlock slides his hand under John’s side, wrapping around him like a giant, gangly octopus. 

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. But don’t think I’ll make the same mistake again, no matter how much I want to,” John says. Sherlock kisses his neck. 

“Yeah,”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys! Here's another chapter for you. What do you guys think? I'm starting to think no one likes this story anymore because no one has commented in four chapters, so please let me know!


	23. The Key

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock's movement has grown beyond him and his.

There are others. All around them, as winter’s grip falls away to the cold, soggy kiss of early spring, so do the walls and weapons thrown up against Freaks. There’s an organization, now- Friends of England- that seeks to familiarize the two groups with one another and work on laws unfairly targeting Freaks and their sympathizers.

Truth be told, this did not just appear as a result of murder, viral videos, and terrorism. No, this was already there, hiding in the hearts of the sane and the rational, just waiting for its opportunity to rear its trailblazing head.

To Friends of England go renegades and runaways, castoffs and criminals; the victims of the system have begun to gather so that, when Sherlock and Mycroft find the time suitable, Xerxes goes to ground and joins them, working his way up from the inside, makes certain of their authenticity before setting up a meeting with the Hat Man, which seems to be one of the main contesting names people have given Sherlock.

It is to this meeting that Sherlock, John, and Evangeline go now, masks already in place, dressed in more black than a funeral, the dark, dank stench of the sewers closing over their heads as they make the treck to an abandoned building, where they shimmy up through a hole in the basement and up the stairs. The house used to be lovely, Sherlock can tell.

He could see each of its ages on its walls; from a brand new, sparkling nest of wealth to stately old-money property to mid-city upper middle class well-to-do dwelling to squatters’ non permanent home to the utter abandonment of today.

Houses are like onions. To get a sense of London’s history, one need only look for a place like this: standing for decades and abandoned like all the other old or maybe just not-as-pretty things are.

They met in the master bedroom, Mr. Vivicus Alls, the shadowy counterpart of Vivian Alls, leader of Friends of England,  striding in cautiously; one could never be too careful when on the way to meet London’s most favored criminal.

As for Sherlock’s group, they stood still and silent, black masked and deadly in the unlit room. Mr. Alls, after glancing at the three of them, strode up to the tallest one- the one that looked to be the leader- and held out his hand.

“Mr…”

“Man,” Sherlock says, adopting Evangeline’s nickname, “Hat Man, as they say. It’s a pleasure, Mr. Alls,” he says smoothly. His mask distorts his voice beyond recognition.

“Ah, yes, it is good to finally meet face to mask the man who inspired… well, a great many things.”

“Oh?” Sherlock says, mildly interested in the darker Alls sibling’s take on Sherlock’s effects.

“Yes. There are reports going out of prisoners- Freak prisoners- being beaten to death or left in solitary confinement for months on end, supposedly said to have heard the words of the Hat Man. Conversely, Naturals have begun to hide Freak runaways, guilty of nothing but their own abilities, and keeping them away from the feelers. Quite the pendulum you’ve created here, Mr. Man.”

“Yes, well, every victory calls for a price that must be paid,” he says, letting go of Alls’ hand and looking at those two that All had brought with him. 

“I’m assuming it’s no accident that you brought a pyrotechnic with you,” he says, eyeing up the girl on the right, who happened to be eyeing up the shortest member of Sherlock’s posse before snapping her face- the only one not wearing a mask is Alls himself- back to Sherlock.

“No, isn’t. This is Mia Magdelaine. They almost stoned her to death because of your videos.”

“My apologies,” Sherlock says, “but now is not the time to go on an extensive look at the damage I have done. I am well aware of all the effects of this work of mine, not just the good ones. If you’d like to keep being petty, then I would ask to speak with Mia Magdelaine alone.”

“And if I would not like?”

“Then I would say we came here to do business, and I suggest we get started.”

“Very well. The reason why I have asked you here today is because there is a very powerful Freak currently being held in solitary confinement.”

“Oh?” he murmurs, silky smooth interest setting Alls even further on edge.

“Yes. We believe he may hold the key to winning?”

“And what lock is there that we would need this particular key?”

“The government,” Alls says without hesitation, “At this point, there’s really only four ways: we win by bargaining, we win by coup, or they win by either of those same measures. Needless to say, we should be prepared for all four. 

“Hence your key.”

“Yes.”

“And what does he do?”

“He… has the ability to cause a minor upset in time.”

“Loops? Rewinding?”

“Ah… not quite. from what my sources tell me. Supposedly he can just stop it, along with the ability to create explosions.”

“Where’s he at?”

“Mirror.” Sherlock tilts his head, the effect surreal with the mask on.

“Yes.”

“You want to go get one person out of fucking mirror.”

“Yes, and we need your help.”

“Clearly.” Sherlock says drily, tilting turning his head to glance at the pyrotechnic and… well, he probably should have noticed that before.

“Tell me, do you always walk around with a telekinetic or is that just for me.”

“Well, we all need protection.”

“Sure, but you realize that if I had been the government, you’d be dead.

“Not necessarily.” Sherlock rolls his eyes behind his mask and speaks again.

“Use your abilities around me, and you will be.”

“Fair enough.”

“Suppose we help you acquire this particular Freak. Then what?”

“He’ll end this all. One way or another.” Alls steps forward, drawing from within his pocket a small picture. He shows it to Sherlock, who looks down, stomach tightening. This has to be a joke. He… that boy died in another life, one far away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh. My. God. Becky. My creative block is hella broke. Whoop de whoop whoop:)  
> Let me know what you guys think.


	24. Victor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We meet the boy who died

At some point, you got tired. Tired of the travelling, of the eyes, of the hostility they didn’t dare voice out loud. If you’re working with a boy who can tell you to die and you’ll do so, you keep your opinions to yourself. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t want to. So you ran. Mesmerized a guard, hopped a tall, barbed wire tipped chain link fence, and you were away as the new moon reached its zenith.

You try to keep your body silent; breath light puffs unseen by what lonely souls you pass, feet almost soundless as you stop running the two mile stretch between the compound and the road. Keeping well back, you follow it from the safety of bushes and trees towards the city. 

Before you make the buildings, e boy is there, appearing out of the night like a wraith and causing you to jump hard. “Don’t mo-” a dirty, rough hand clapped over your mouth. A man’s hand. You bite on instinct. Your head whips back, knocking the lower half of it against someone’s forehead. You hear a swear, throw an elbow, and break free.

“Shit!” The man says, and you realize it’s a boy with big hands.

“Be still,” you say, calm and commanding. The boy relaxes, his breath evening out, arms falling to his side.

“Who are you?” You say, throat working. You were afraid that, after the last one, it wouldn’t work.

“Victor.”

“Why are you here?”

“‘M running away,” he says, a shadow of anxiety crossing over his features.”

“From who?”

“The army.” You pause for a moment, the idea in your head wild and unruly and it takes all of your self control to not jump the gun.

“Why?”

“I’m tired of breathing fire,” he says.

“Show me,” you say, interested. He turns his head to the side a bit, raises his hands to cup air an inch from his chin, and breaths out a plume of flames.

“Oh,” you comment when he finishes. To hell with it all.

“Wanna go together?”

“...Yeah,” the boy says.

“You can move now,” you say, turning and running off into the bushes on the road side. The boy joins you a moment later, and you take comfort in the way your breathing and footsteps sync up.

Morning light is just breaking the horizon by the time the two of you get to the city. Months of travelling with the British Army having made the both of you capable enough to keep running through the hours until dawn. Bodies sweaty and chilled by the nighttime cold, you stop at the edge of a flat, empty field. The edge of the city. You can see guards on the other side. 

You turn to look at the boy, eyes connecting with his. He lifts a finger to his lips and turns back to the guards. You decide to trust him, deciding to watch him to see what he does. It seems like only a moment has passed before he’s got his hand wrapped around your bicep, pulling you up. 

Your head feels muddled and disoriented, like something happened right in front of you and you’ve already forgotten. You look from him to his hand to the guards. 

“What did you do?” you ask.

“It’s my other ability,” he says as he tugs you across the bare plane and past the guards, over the gate, and into the city. You walk past throngs of passersby and the guardsmen observing them and not one of them moves.

“Are you freezing everyone and everything simultaneously or are you stopping time?”

“The latter. Hey, what do you do?”

“I make people do things. All I have to do is say it.”

“What if you’re not saying anything or voicing a command?” You shrug. You like this Victor character. You know he’s not as smart as you are, but you also know that he chose to be with you. If he could have frozen time at any point, then he could have easily done so the moment he saw you or the one right after you released him. 

Up and down streets you wander, searching for a place to hide out at.

“What’s the plan?” He says. You spy an electronics store. In the window sit a bunch of laptops and sound systems and an external hard drive with a Deal of the Week sign sitting on top of it.

“We’re going to get one of those,” you say with a nod to the former, “and then we’re going to figure out what we need to be here legally.”

“We should probably get food, too.”

“And clothes. And deodorant,” you say, musingly.

“We should probably split up.”

“Yeah. I’ll get the laptop. You get the clothes. And if you find food, well, you know that part.” Victor nods and keeps walking while you turn towards the shop. It won’t be the first time you’ve stolen something, but it might just be the easiest.

“Oh! I almost forgot!” Victor says, calling you back just as you open the door.

“If you interact with something, it wakes up without me actively keeping it asleep. For some reason, it doesn’t work for the ground or anti-grav chambers.” you had been in one of those. They were trying to calm you down. It just made you worse.

“So…,” you say, “don’t touch anything you don’t want active.”

“Yeah.”

“See ya, then,” you say, and make your way into the electronics store.

An hour later, the two of you settle into an old building that no one’s been in for years, sleeping bags pulled up under your armpits and his, hands wrapped around large travel mugs of cocoa. The two of them came up with more things to grab when you caught up with Victor in a Tesco.

Looking up at the old, mouldy ceilings, you think about this thing that Victor can do.

“So what are you going to do after this?”

“Blow through to the next city. I wanna get to Europe. Maybe America. Anywhere but around here.”

“We should go together.”

“Why should I take you?” Victor says, “I could kill you now and bury you before I unfreeze everything.”

“Cause you won’t be able to avoid anyone you don’t see coming,” you reply.

“And you can?”

“Yeah.”

“Prove it.”

“I know they don’t know about your time-stopping abilities, and that you were on the front lines with the rest of the Freaks they have in service. You’ll probably develop a dependency on the former, and you have a high chance of PTSD, given the amount of people you’ve burned to a crisp. I know you don’t know who I am or have even heard of me, and I know you couldn’t tell what sincerity looks like if it smacked you in the forehead,” you fire off. You can see he’s uncomfortable now- unable to deny a single thing like so many others.

Then his brow smooths, mouth relaxes, and eyes sparkle.

“I see what you mean,” he says, “and it looks like we’re going together, now, if you’re down with it.” You smile, and the two of you bed down for the night. Neither of you can sleep, though. Tentatively, Victor puts a hand out, feeling for yours in the dark. He finds and squeezes it and you squeeze back; an unspoken yes. He wriggles over until you’re pressed together in the cold room from head to knee.

The next morning, you are awakened early when the cold presses in too close for sleep. Together, you and Victor rise and pack your things, hands a bit clumsy and shaky in the frosty air. Victor stops time again, and you venture from the house and walk the length of the town. You are in the next one by dark, and bed down in another abandoned house. There’s a lot of them around here. Not many will who have funds for a house will stay so close to the border.

There’s a bed in this one; whoever was here took only what they needed for travel and left the rest. Victor checks it for bedbugs- something you don’t know how to do- and, finding it clear of any pests, the two of you bed down in it. This time, you unzip both sleeping bags and lay them so that it creates a giant cocoon that you both slide under.

A few hours after you drift off to sleep- a sight warmer than last time- you wake up to find that there is someone else here. Someone else is walking through the bubble safety around you and Victor. You stay still, forcing your breathing and heart rate to remain steady as the spectre wanders the room, seeming to touch everything the two of you touched. Fingertips alight against the spot Victor had pressed his elbow upon earlier, the place where you had set the packs besides the bed. The edge of the top sleeping bag you two rest under.

It hovers over Victor’s unconscious head, and, just as you are about to strike out at the spectre, Vic beats you to it, throwing out a hand with a knife just high enough to jab the stranger in the jaw. At that same moment, the gun the stranger had in his hand- one that you didn’t see before hand- comes up and is fired directly down at the forehead of Victor. 

The split second after, the spectre and Vic freeze time simultaneously.  You Victor must have protected you, because you can still move, though the two apex predators of this game are frozen. You know what you have to do. You know you can’t stay after you’ve done it. You clamber out of bed and pull all the warmest clothes you have and then touch Victor’s hand and knife, allowing it to assume the position it would if the enemy was frozen. Then, you touch the head of the man, letting the damage be done. At that single instance, the gun slips your mind, and the bullet finishes leaving the chamber, burying it in Vic’s head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I know, I've been a very bad author, ignoring shit for almost a full month. But I had really good reason this time. I found this writer's website called Scribophile and I posted the first couple chapters of my original work there, so if any of you would like to read that, let me know:)  
> Also, feel free to comment and tell me how well the action seen went.


	25. Infiltration

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang break into Mirror

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> they use code names, which I've listed below.
> 
> Alpha: Mycroft  
> Beta: John  
> Gamma: Sherlock  
> Delta: Xerxes  
> Epsilon: Evangeline  
> Zeta: The Telepath  
> Eta: the pyrotechnic.

“Victor Trevor is alive,” Mr. Alls says.

“He had a bullet in his head, the last I heard.”

“Well, there’s something strange about his abilities that kept him from dying long enough for someone to remove the bullet.”

“Like what?”

“We know that Trevor had the ability to stop and start time at will, along with stop and start objects and people within said time. We believe that, in the moment before impact, he created a loop within a loop. This would have saved him from his execution.” Sherlock understands the rest of it now, too.

“Do you have a plan?”

“Yes. We liberate him in not too long. For now, though, I need your agreement. Either you’re in, or we tell you nothing.” Sherlock can tell that the man is both dead serious and dead honest.

“Okay.”

 

…

 

Two weeks later, after another assassination and another viral video, Sherlock, Xerxes, Evangeline, and Mycroft sit in the back of the van with the flamethrower and the telekinetic from the first meeting. Sherlock would bring Donovan along, but she’s quite high profile right now, as she has officially been declared missing.

Two miles away from their destination, the van stops, and it’s occupants exit it. In short order, the group, who have been training for this mission since its conception, make their way through catacombs and to a small, heavy iron door. 

The telepath, whose name Sherlock still does not know, keys the combination, and, after a final, brief scan of the place, opens it up, spitting them out into a delivery tunnel. The door they came in from is close to the entrance to the world above, rather than the one to Mirror. This end is, according to the blueprints Sherlock studied, wider than the beginning. This is due to a dock of sorts; a place where outsiders stop and insiders take over. They check all incoming packages before allowing it into the building. The large boxes there now bear small yellow flags sticking out from their extremities; these ones have already been checked.

They move underneath the sickly color of electric lights to the side of the tunnel and Sherlock knows that in less than five minutes, that door at the end will open, and a troupe of delivery men and women will come to collect the merchandise. What an unfortunate lack of security, to leave these boxes, which are weirdly easy to open, out here alone. 

In short order, the weights that had been in them to disguise the later presence of people are removed and hidden behind that seldom used door, which had only been oiled for this specific break in.

“We’re a box short,” someone mutters into the comms.

“Beta.” Sherlock says, calling to him John, who, without a word, squeezes into Sherlock’s box with him. This was risky; if they compared the package’s weight, they will be found out. But no one tries to break into Mirror. Sherlock’s betting they won’t bother.

Sherlock swings the lid closed, and Mycroft, seeing his brother and annoyingly close lover taken care of, closes the top on his own capsule. The thing about deliveries is that, in order to keep inmates from using whatever comes in, they automatically lock, and they have passcodes which, while that might be a problem on any random escapee, is easily dealt with by those who come prepared.

They stay absolutely still, with the exception of John’s thumb, which makes a slow, methodical up and down along Sherlock’s back. Sherlock thinks that maybe John doesn’t like closed places.

“Are you okay?” He asks John.

“I’ve been buried alive before.”

“Oh.” He kisses John’s hair- the only part currently in reach- before relaxing. The important thing about waiting is you have to conserve your energy. Sooner or later, you’ll need it, and if it got wasted on tension while there was nothing to be tense about, then that’s your fault.

“Yeah.” The rest of the weight is silent and less than a minute long before Sherlock hears the heavy metal grind of a large door opening echo down the way.

Voices, distorted with the acoustics of the tunnel tell Sherlock nothing. Not a sound is out of place as the crates are loaded and brought inside. In the dead dark of the box, Mycroft thinks about Sherlock. About how, when this is done, his brother will not be able to go back to living a normal life. 

How it may be in everyone’s best interest if he perished at some point.

“Ready?” Comes the voice of Sherlock (Gamma).

“No. There are cameras.” Zeta says, and it’s long, silent minutes as they wait for the telepath to do her work.

“Ready.” Sherlock presses the button on the small controller in his hand, remotely inputting the code and opening his lid. He and John and the others clamber up out of their hiding places.

“Masks on,” Sherlock says as his lights up yellow, the graphic on the helmet a yellow smiley face. It is designed to look like it’s been spray painted. John’s is blue and sharp edged. Sherlock likes it on him.

With Zeta controlling the minds of the guards, rendering the cameras useless. They plan to lift a copy of their exploits, along with everything else they can find, so that the world can see. Beta adjust his bag, as does Alpha, and the two fall in and make their way past the wide door, whose keycode was lifted from the mind of the guard who left.

In no time, they are filing out into the hallway and headed to find Sherlock’s one time friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was originally going to be a bit longer, but it would have ruined the plot.


	26. Kidney Stone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They find Victor Trevor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alpha: Mycroft  
> Beta: John  
> Gamma: Sherlock  
> Delta: Xerxes  
> Epsilon: Evangeline  
> Zeta: The Telepath  
> Eta: the pyrotechnic.

Down, down, down into the warren of the hospital they go. The walls are bleach white and death creeps about like an undetectable miasma. Finally, they reach a door they cannot get through. Not with the various key cards acquired for the incursion. Not with anything short of a use of powers, which is unfortunate, since any such thing will end in detection, and they can’t be detected. Not just yet.

John- Beta, Sherlock reminds himself- has gone curiously still.

“I know this place.” he says, voice hushed with awe and horror that leaks through the voice distorter.

“Well, is that good or bad?”

“That depends.” Beta pulls off his glove, and Sherlock’s throat catches as he reveals the translucent one underneath and lays his hand against the door.

“Well, hell.” he murmurs as he digs underneath his turtleneck and pulls out a plastic card and swipes it. The click of a disengaging lock is the only noise in the place.

“How do you have one?”

“Because I was killed here, and I had my card copied before the fact.” John pushes through the opening first, the new leader with no discussion needed. He cannot help but be reminded.

 

…

 

_The kid stared off into the distance, a bullet embedded halfway into his brain, a single pen frozen in space just inches from his thigh to mark where time froze around him._

_“You’ll need to keep at least part of your body on the outside, connected to someone living,” Mr. Moran said, hands clasped behind his back. His eyes are fixed on the kid, but John knew his mind was elsewhere, thinking of other things. John nodded and turned to wait. With the feel of a warm grip on his shoulders, he got to work digging out the bullet with a surgeon’s precision. When the channel was free of debris, he tried to raise the boy to find he couldn’t._

_“It’s not working. I think I’ll have to step all the way inside.”_

_“You can’t.”_

_“Then you’ll be sitting with a dead boy on your table.”_

_There was a pause then, as they eyed each other up and then:_

_“Fine.” Three weeks later, John was brought back to tend to him._

_“You hurt yourself a great deal, don’t you?”_

_“Yes.”_

_“Why?”_

_“Because I want to die.”_

_“But you can’t.”_

_“No. I can’t.”_

_“Why do you say that?”_

_“Fucks like you will just bring me back over and over. It hurts, you know. To come alive again.”_

_“I know.”_

_“How’d you die?”_

_“I’ve been shot in the shoulder and in the thigh; bled out both times. I’ve had my head and lungs crushed on separate occasions.” He tended to the wad of cotton pressed to the boy’s wrist. The miserable expression had lifted somewhat; interest usurping his features._

_“What’s it like for you?”_

_“When people die, sometimes other sensations take over; being shot in the shoulder gives way to shock. The brain ceases to work. You know, things like that. I am aware of everything to an unnatural degree whenever I die; every capillary and fat cell comes alive. So if there’s bone fragments sticking into my heart or brain, there is no avoiding it. When the damage is done- hell, even if there is more after I actually die- and I can sense everything, though my senses no longer work, I stay there, on that precipice, as things begin to move back into place. I can feel every millimeter fragment and, when the damage has undone itself to justify being alive, I am reborn. But that process strains me, and sometimes I don’t survive it, so I do it again. And again. And again,” John said, twisting his head to the side a bit as he looked a little more intently at the jagged, frayed lines of flayed flesh on the boy’s wrist._

_“I… I didn’t know.”_

_“You didn’t ask and you don’t need to, so keep that to yourself, please.” John said as he got to work remedying the injuries._

_Months later, as John was back tending to yet more of the boy’s injuries, he said something “unfortunate”. Something along the lines of “this will pass. Like a kidney stone. But still, it will pass.” They shot him for that one. They told him not to give the kid hope._

_They said it was for the peace of the hospital._

_John knew it was because they intended to one day use his abilities- his time stopping abilities, which were not allowed to strengthen enough to break free- to their benefit. He had said that thing to him, acknowledging the wretchedness of the situation and its impermanence in one breath, and they had shot him in the head for it, torn the bullet out in the messiest manner, and filmed his slow regeneration._

_He was John Watson._

_He was much older than he looked, and this, right here, is the fucking reason why._

…

 

The boy floats now, suspended inside of a tube.

“That’s new,” Beta murmurs as he roams the perimeter of the contraption. No one can see inside, but there’s no doubt of the tub’s occupant. Beta locates the computer and, with Gamma’s help, they open up the lid.

Inside is a thick, non-viscous liquid which holds what looks like a corpse. With Gamma and Alpha (Mycroft) holding him and Delta (Xerxes) help they manage to haul the body out, revealing Sherlock’s one time best friend, who immediately seems to struggle to breath again as liquid pours out of him.

“Oh,” Gamma says as Beta pats his back to dispel the rest of the substance

“Who…”

“Kidney stone,” Beta says as he picks up the boy- a man now- and the group makes their escape with a shivering, wet, but very much alive Victor Trevor.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry for this wait guys. I was really busy and life was just a bitch for this entire time. But I'm back and thank you to all those who are still reading.


	27. Distant Times

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mycroft is found out in a lie

It becomes immediately apparent that they cannot simply use Victor Trevor. He’s too thin, has trust issues like nobody’s business, and he’s not been in the world for some years now. So they wait. They keep up their regular broadcasts, their irregular attacks, and their arguing, but they no longer aim to use Sherlock’s one time friend.

One sunny day just right for a light jacket, John is sitting in the window looking out, hidden from view by a curtain. He does not hear footsteps, but he knows Victor is there, watching.

“What brings you here?”

“I go where I want to,” he says, as obstinate as a man as he was as a child.

“Fair enough.” Victor moves just inside the doorway of the sitting room to lean in shadow against the wall.

“You have questions.”

“Why did you come and get me?”

“Because we thought you might be the key.”

“The key to what?”

“There’s a war going on right now, Vic. Freaks versus Naturals, people versus government.”

“And you think I might be able to help.”

“I know you can. You were very, very powerful on the first day that I met you, hungry and cold and scared as you were.”

“I wasn’t scared.” John doesn’t dignify that with an answer.

“I know you’re downplaying your abilities. I know that, if you chose to, you could freeze all London in time at will. Likely more than that, because of how long you’ve had to mature.”

“But you haven’t told anyone?”

“Well, Sherlock’s likely guessed, and it’s a tossup what Mycroft knows, but no. If they figured anything out, it was on their own.” Victor had, by now, moved closer. This was his doctor. The doctor who had been shot, right in front of him, for telling him things he shouldn’t know. This is the doctor who had shown him humanity in the face of a machine. This is the doctor who showed him how to hope without ever saying the word.

He could trust The Doctor.

“What would you need me to do?”

“Stop time. Stop as much of it as you can, for as long as you can, covering as wide a range as you can.”

“That might just kill me.”

“You can’t die.”

“What?”

“They never told you?”

“No…”

“I raised you, love. Not once but thrice. You cannot die unless I kill you.” Victor sat next to him, lost in thought, and John finds himself automatically checking him for signs of improving health. He’s grateful to find many.

“Okay. I’ll do it.”

 

…

 

“THAT IS NOT WHAT YOU SAID YOU NEEDED!” John roared over the frenzy.

Across from him sits Xerxes, Mycroft and Irene. To his left sits Sherlock, Victor sandwiched between them. To his right, Evangeline seems inclined to hide behind the angry little man.

This is not good at all.

“Mr. Watson if you would please calm down. I’m sure we could work through this.”

“You want calm? Okay, here’s an idea. Don’t fucking talk to me about being calm. We are a team, Mycroft, and we’re in this together. You don’t get to jeopardize all our lives by keeping secrets. You said you needed him to stop time. Not stop a man.

“I’ll keep what secrets I like, Watson, and you would be wise to remember that I am not a child and you do not need to yell.” John leaned over the table and, with his cold eyes and wide pupils locked onto Mycroft like twin death rays, said very, very quietly:

“I’ll yell if I want to. Now, you’re going to tell me everything you know about this man, and then we, as a team, are going to decide how to make our next move.”

Next to him, Victor Trevor sits back in his chair and takes a drink of water, throat dry. Under the table, Sherlock’s hand settles briefly over his, big and warm. The wordless support alleviates some of the tightness in his chest. 

If nothing else, Sherlock and The Doctor are on his side. 

Across from them, Mycroft looks away, remembering.

 

…

 

He was a decorated military man, this stranger. Effortlessly charming, and with steel underneath, he was comfortable in a ballroom full of people. Mycroft’s parents have yet to meet him. The boy himself did not watch him, but he certainly paid attention. The Holmes’ eldest child had grown up some since he’d left for Uni. Now that he was back, more than a dozen guests who’d seen him when he was younger had all remarked how good he looks.

Mycroft supposes he does look good. Back in all black with subtle silver jewelry and carefully kept copper hair on a slim, tall figure, there were few who were as understatedly well turned out as he. Except for the gentleman there. The gentleman Mycroft did not wish to meet. 

For a moment, his attention flicked away to track down where Sherlock is and- ah, there, settled on a settee watching the goings-on with eyes half lidded in boredom. He would have to either be disappeared soon or Mycroft needed to bring him something to do. He did not dare give Sherlock pen and paper. Adults always wanted to see what he was doing, and the inside of his little brother’s mind was no place for the casual viewer.

Mycroft looked for their parents, gauging their moods. They often insisted that children ought to stay at events until it was time for bed, but Mycroft knew for a fact that no one would miss the strange youngest Holmes. It was merely a matter of timing to get him upstairs to a Library where he could leave him installed for hours. So long as the boy was fed, he would amuse himself (quietly, Sher, or you’ll have to stay down here)

Mycroft moved to head off the impending disaster of Sherlock’s boredom when things seemed to just… stop. People no longer moved. Glasses did not clink. Lips did not leave imprints on glass. Champaign did not bubble. Chests did not rise. No heads cocked coyly. The sound of the violinists caught and held on a single note.

Time did not move. Instinctually, Mycroft froze as well, but he knew he could still move. He looked around, light blue eyes breaking from Sherlock, his still baby mouth caught half open in a yawn. 

The eldest Holme’s gaze spun till they landed on the gentleman from earlier.

“Hello, my lad. My name is Charles Augustus Magnussen, and I believe we can be beneficial to each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hot shit guys. Is this the muse, come to visit me at last? Along with her cousin the update monkey? I think it is. Sufferin suckatache.


	28. Time Stop

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The end

They refer to him as Cam, and he has been pulling all the strings for a very, very long time. His one natural enemy would be another time stopper of similar prowess and ability. The one person that fits the criteria is Victor Trevor.

The blond sat very still, a million thoughts racing behind a dead face and dull eyes.

He could do it. He knows he could. Magnussen… he is getting older. Tired. A little more worn out. He could do it, but he does not wish to. Magnussen is older. He is better. He’s been doing this longer. He would have Sherlock, but he could lose him, too. His Doctor would help him. Has vouched for him already. He can’t lose the doctor, though. Not in the way he could lose Sherlock. 

He does not wish to, but he knows he must. Magnussen is the trump card. Take it out of the hand, and the whole thing loses its rudder and its power. He would have the Doctor, Sherlock, and his strange and irritatingly knowledgeable brother.

Victor blinks, back in his own body again. Sherlock is pretending not to watch him. John has just entered in with tea. The brother is sitting in a chair at the far end of the room. 

“I’ll do it,” Victor says, and three sets of eyes of varying intensity are suddenly pinned on him.

 

…

 

The building is a nice one- a big and shiny skyscraper with beautifully curved facets that stretch high into the side and end in a delicate point almost lost in the dreary London smog.

Victor swallows. It’s important to not tip off Cam to his presence for as long as possible. Break’s hand in his is reassuring. Evangeline clinging to his neck in the form of a mouse even more so. Sherlock has his other hand. The others are waiting in the wings, ready.

Just then, they see something unfortunate. There is a fairly narrow hallway leading to each of the elevators, and each of those ways has been installed with a portable FD, or freak detector. They won’t get through. Someone must have anticipated their attack on this building and sprung for the fastest solution. 

There aren’t any paws on his neck.  Just moments after Victor realizes this, a gargantuan ape is smashing around the place, attacking things at random. Curiously enough, seemingly randomly aimed debris smashes into one of the FDs. They take their chance, and Victor prays that Evangeline does

Once past the FD they pause, waiting. The doors open. Four people get out. One gets in. They quickly follow suit and spread out along the walls. She presses the number four.

“Top floor, please,” Sherlock’s deep, melodic voice says behind her. She does as told. Downstairs, Mycroft Holmes, dressed dramatically in all black, attacks the front of the building with an army of ice soldiers. He is still hidden. No need to reveal the attacker yet.

“Distraction caused.” someone said in Victor’s ear. He hopes Evangeline is alright. She’s such a brave little girl. 

The elevator opens.

The hallway is long and quiet, aside from the alarm bells going off. Everyone must have fled, leaving office doors open, papers lying scattered here and there and, nearer to one wall than the other, a broken coffee mug, the liquid inside having spilled out across the tile.

Carefully, the three of them creep along the hallway. Victor’s heart slams inside his chest, harder than the other two. 

Technically, the objective is simple: Kill Cam. 

In practice, though, it’s a whole lot harder. Cam, like Victor, can stop and start time. Cam, like Victor, has spent years and years honing this ability. Cam, unlike Victor, has been ready for this for a long, long time. They pause, meters from the open door of office ZA-19.

They flatten along the wall, three pairs of feet silent on the tile, breath nonexistent. Sweat breaks out as Xerxes peaks around the doorway, then leads the other two inside. Cam sits there, behind a big modern chrome-and-glass desk, writing something out in pen.

He stops writing. Sherlock anticipates the move and reaches forwards to touch Xerxes shoulder so that, when time froze, he would remain invisible. Victor let go of their hands and pulled out his gun. 

He gets out a shot but the bullet freezes a meter away from Cam’s face. 

“Ah, Victor, and here I thought we’d broken you years ago.”

“You didn’t.”

“You don’t say. Tell me, what is your plan?” Victor fires a second round at him and touches the bullet, unleashing it from the time stop inside a time stop. Again, Cam stops both in their tracks.

Victor grunts, leaping over the desk to attack him bodily. Cam is ready, throwing Victor away and time stopping him too. Victor does not undo it, merely unfreezes himself within the freezing. This is, unbeknownst to Cam, the same thing he has done with Sherlock and Xerxes, who are just standing there, waiting. They cannot unfreeze themselves, so whatever they’re going to do, they have one shot to do it with. 

Victor is young and angry. Cam is getting on in his years. It’s nothing for the former to tackle the latter, gun in hand, aiming to fire at point blank range before the older man can stop the bullet.

Cam comes up with a knife, prepared to gut Victor, when a voice rings out, rumbling and powerful.

“STOP, CHARLES AUGUSTUS MAGNUSSEN,” Sherlock calls out as he captures the hand that has the knife in it. In the next second, he is frozen mid air. But so is Cam. Victor doesn’t give himself time to think about the fact that he’s shooting a man who cannot shoot back. 

He just fires, and a perfect round hole appears in Cam’s head. At point blank range, it should explode out the back. It hits him.

Sherlock is frozen in time.

What that means is that every single condition that existed at the moment of freezing also exists in the void. When Sherlock was frozen, the sound did not quite die in his throat. There is a low hum to be heard. It is not the sort of hum that goes on because time is moving and machines are hard at work. It is a single note, unfluctuating and solid, because only a single not played right then. Similarly, Sherlock’s ability to command grows with each passing second. 

The ability to resist has an inverse relation. 

The time stops that Charles Augustus Magnussen could do, in that one moment, had shrunken down to his body mass, and that had been enough to do a time stop just before being shot. Those applied to the self are the most powerful ones, and Cam is only just more powerful.

Downstairs, Evangeline had shifted back to her original form, and she lay stretched out on the gleaming tile, her blood spreading out over the floor. The inside of the building had been taken over by ice. Frozen colonnades stretched from floor to ceiling. Frost lined the front desk and the wreckage of the FDs. Some of the ice kept the wound from falling apart, kept the guts in, slowed the blood.


	29. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it's the end, folks

It is summer. Because they're in England, it is still quite cool. Nice and bearable. The day is perfect for this thing they want to do. The group sits together in the back of one of Mycroft's cars. 

They stop near a small copse of trees and, between Sherlock and John and Victor, Evangeline is removed from the car and carried slowly through the trees so that she can enjoy it. The girl's small hands clutch tightly at Sherlock’s shoulders. She is scared because she is rarely picked up, but excitement builds in her chest. 

They did it. Sherlock took her out to the countryside, just like he said he would. It’s perfect, just now, even if she can’t walk anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who read this all the way through. Critique is welcome and yall have a nice day okay?


End file.
